


Intercession

by PrincessDesire



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Covid-like illness, HIPAA non-compliance, Immortal Yusuf, M/M, Magical Nicky, Mortal Nicky, Old Guard Big Bang 2021, non-permanent major character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 16:13:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29561712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrincessDesire/pseuds/PrincessDesire
Summary: When Nicolò spots the late-night visitor and his human care package at the edge of the swamp, he knows he's being called upon as a healer. He doesn't know that Yusuf is immortal and that the elderly woman he carries is actually his granddaughter.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 24
Kudos: 131
Collections: The Old Guard Big Bang





	1. Late-Night Visitor

**Author's Note:**

> The gorgeous artwork in this fic was done by the very talented Mewbotz. Find her at: https://mewbotz.tumblr.com/
> 
> Potential Trigger Warning: There is some time spent in a hospital and there is a respiratory illness. If you've lost someone to Covid and think that might be a trigger, you can skip chapter 3 entirely and you can come back in at chapter 4's sentence: "Their trip is mostly silent."

“The minute I heard my first love story,

I started looking for you, not knowing

how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.

They're in each other all along.”

― **Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi,** [**The Illuminated Rumi** ](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/791993)

  
  


The night that Nicolò meets Yusuf is a picture-perfect stereotype of a bayou summer night. The cacophonous frogs provide a rhythm to his gentle banjo strumming. The frenzy of their mating calls almost drowns out the instrument, but he doesn’t mind; he’s new to playing it and makes many mistakes. He’s out on the porch tucked (mostly) safely behind the netting he’d been smart enough to string across it before the weather changed. The occasional landing of a mosquito means little to him anymore and it’s well worth the risk of a short-lived itch to escape the heat in the house. 

He’d been wary when moving into the place two years ago. The swamp had seemed less than welcoming with its dangerous critters, stifling heat, and fecund fungi. He’d assured himself it would be worth those drawbacks for both its seclusion and rich spiritual opportunities. He hadn’t been wrong and he’d undershot what Louisiana had to offer. Here in the historic hub of the slave trade, superstition stayed interwoven into the locals’ DNA so that they’re not just curious about the lone foreign-accented man in the swamp, but actively drawn to him. They’d known he was a magic-user before they’d known his name, intuited it with deep spiritual roots that not even modern skepticism could sever. He’s never known such acceptance. It’s a lonely existence more often than not, but rewarding. He’s more connected to the often-described but never-defined realm that floats beside reality like a fog, sometimes thick and obscuring but most often invisible, just vapors passing through the nose. Here on the murky waters, Nicolò practices communicating with it and learns where his place resides within its affectionate embrace.

While Nicolò does have an electric generator, he prefers the gas-powered lantern once it gets dark. It creates an aura of bright comfort, casting long shadows out where the ground is more water than ground and the mysterious monsters of the night alternate between quiet stalking and deadly play. It feels like the house is the last safe place on earth, and his bed with its pronounced center dip and homemade log cabin quilt its epicenter. He’s just about ready to grab the lantern and retire for the night when he spots a light far too big to be a firefly on the horizon. With growing trepidation he watches it move closer, eventually growing large enough in its closeness to illuminate a figure - a man carrying a large bundle. 

Nicolò's house is surrounded by water most of the year. It creates a natural moat that facilitated his purchase of a used and abused pirogue with more patchwork than his quilt. This time of year, the driest of seasons, though, he has something akin to a front lawn, strips of land not quite submerged and firm enough to create walkways up to the house. Even in summer, whoever is trespassing on his property has to walk the remainder - no cars here. He knows all too well the type of visitors who come in the dead of night to visit people like him: the desperate. 

The ball of anxiety that fills his stomach as he watches the man approach only grows heavier when he realizes that the bundle is a person wrapped up cocoon-tight in a blanket. This person needs a medicine man. Nicolò has been before, and he will again. It’s better than when they want a necromancer. That could be the situation now; he has no evidence that the blanket-covered person is alive, but it doesn’t feel that way, and Nicolò trusts his instincts.

Setting down the banjo, he rises as the stranger’s foot clears the protective circle of magicked soil demarcated by smooth stones spaced exactly 13 inches apart. There’s no hesitation, meaning the man intends him no harm; if he did, the man’s leg would have cramped causing him to drop his human bundle. Nicolò hadn’t been worried, not about the stranger’s intent anyway.

“I am told you are a healer,” the man says. They face each other with only the netting of the porch and two or three yards between them. He’s got a beard and large wet eyes. His curls are frizzy with the humidity, resembling carob trees during a windstorm. “Is what they say about you true?”

The bulk of the accent is Arabian, but other influences abound. A world traveler like himself, then. Nicolò is always curious about those that he meets, and hearing others’ stories, collecting them as one would curio knick-knacks used to be a favorite pastime of his before he’d chosen to seclude himself away. He wants to hear this man’s story.

He’s not nearly so eager to talk about himself, but he’d been asked directly, and he can’t deny that he has the ability to heal. Shaman, medicine man, healer: one and the same. He nods, unable to deny that he has a certain healing capacity, though he can’t make promises for the health of the man’s delivery, and he doesn’t know what exactly the locals have been saying about him, but rumors tend to loom larger than life. 

Nicolò unzips the screen around his porch and steps back, allowing the man to come through, blanket clutched tightly to his chest. His forehead is damp with sweat and some stray curls have adhered to it. They haven’t even exchanged names but he wants to use his finger to brush the stray hairs up with the rest of the untamed bush.

“You can bring her inside.” Nicolò's guessing the patient’s gender, but the man doesn’t correct him, and it isn’t as important as their condition. He leads the way, opening the screen door into the overheated cottage. The stranger removes his shoes before stepping inside, a polite custom, and an absolute necessity given the damp environment. 

Nicolò had thought the place too big at first. His childhood home hadn’t had an abundance of space and none of the more urban places he’s lived have either, but he’s come to appreciate the extra room, rickety as it is, especially times like this when he can direct the man to set the patient down on the spare bed that had come with the place (after he’s thrown a reasonably clean blanket over the top). 

The elderly woman shakes even within the heat of the room and she cries out softly, “Jidee. Jidee.” 

“I’m here, Grace. I’m here.” He sits beside her and strokes her grey hair. Her eyes have cataracts and Nicolò would guess her vision by the light of the lantern in his hand is near worthless. Unfortunately, there are no lamps set up in this room, so he can’t even flick on a light. To his host, the man explains, “It’s her heart. They say there’s nothing more they can do. She’s been on hospice since yesterday.”

This is a worst-case scenario. This man wants him to prevent the natural conclusion of human aging. “How old are you?” he asks the woman.

It’s the man who answers. “She will be 93 in the winter.”

92 years old with a failing heart; at this point, the man _is_ practically asking for necromancy. 

The man must read something on Nicolò's face because he adds a plea, “She is my only family. When she dies, I will have nothing left.” Tears roll shamelessly from his eyes, paths that appear well-tread today already. 

“If I can help, it will be only a delay,” Nicolò warns.

The man nods and the motion knocks off some of his tears onto the dying woman. “I would consider each moment a blessing, as I have always done with my darling Grace.” 

Nicolò's heart clenches. He remembers the feel of the love of family, but for his, it had never been so intense, not even before they’d learned what he could do. How differently life could go with that kind of love and how much better off the world would be if more could care so. 

“I need to prepare. If you’d like food or water, you may follow me; most of what I will need is in my kitchen.” 

The man speaks to the frail woman, explains that he’ll be gone only a minute, though she doesn’t seem to understand, and he wraps the blanket tight around her, probably more to keep her in place than to stop her trembling. “Be good, Gracy. Wait for Jidee to return.”

Nicolò leaves the lantern for the woman, and leads the way to the first lamp (the one in by his broken recliner that can never retract) with hands outstretched.

The kitchen is actually two rooms that can be separated by a sliding partition. On one side is his stove and fridge and spices; the other is a wall of compartments housing bottles, jars, Tupperware, and any other containers that are the right size or shape for their contents. Nicolò fetches a couple of glasses and pours water from the jug in the fridge for his guests. The man takes one with a word of thanks before chugging back its contents. His Adam’s apple bobs with each thirsty gulp, and Nicolò is unsure if it’s the man’s thirst that suddenly dries his own mouth or something more libidinous. When the glass is empty, Nicolò refills it before setting to work. 

First, he grabs the long burgundy table runner hand-embroidered with symbols that normally hangs like a curtain over the compartments on the right side of the room. He lays this across his narrow rectangular dining room table. It will help to protect ingredients from the corruption of intrusive otherworldly essences and it will keep the more vile of components from mixing with his food when he dines here tomorrow. 

The man watches him as he gathers up the containers he needs. Normally having someone watch his process would create tension for him, but rather than feel that he’s in the spotlight, a stage magician for the desperate relative of a dying woman, it feels companionable. “Is there any way that I can help?”

“I will need an empty mason jar and a lid with holes. There should be some above the fridge on the left.”

The man finds the jars in question and as he pulls one down, he says softly, “My name is Yusuf. Her name is Grace.” He sets the jar beside Nicolò, ready to be instructed what to do next. 

“Nice to meet you, Yusuf. How are you at holding a flashlight?”

Just as it had been a perfect night for banjo plucking, it’s also a great night for catching frogs. They’re loud and abundant, but also slippery and active. It takes many tries, but eventually and with no shortage of unintentional smiles from Yusuf, Nicolò manages to snare one. A frog’s heart isn’t ideal even as a symbol. If the woman was younger, he’d try and find something larger with a slower beat, but he can’t give Grace even a frog’s lifespan. She’ll be lucky to enjoy another birthday if her fragile body is any indication. The heart is surely not the only organ of hers that is ready to rest. Yusuf can’t keep bringing her here for liver and lungs and whatever else protests the years next. No, this will be her one magical extension, at least by Nicolò's hands, and the frog’s heart will suffice.

He washes his mud-caked arms, reciting Catholic purification prayers as he does, cleansing himself inside and out at the same time. Yusuf does similarly after him, words that Nicolò can’t understand falling musically from him. His assistance is appreciated. It might even help - his intention is tangible and magic loves a strong intention. 

“Please set the jar with the frog on the window ledge near Grace’s head and I will need you to remove her blouse.”

There is no distrust in Yusuf, as evidenced by the lack of hesitation in carrying out Nicolò's orders and when he returns, he follows Yusuf’s gesture and takes a seat on the opposite side of the table. 

Nicolò warns, “I am about to begin the ritual. If you wish to remain, I would ask that you focus on the intent to extend Grace’s life with all the respect due to the powers that we invoke. Do not bring fear or hate, not to this ritual.” Curses sometimes require hate, but Nicolò hasn’t performed those often and only in the direst of circumstances. “If the powers grant our request, it is by their will only that we succeed. Do not think that we are controlling, but humbly requesting.”

Yusuf nods and there’s something deep in the warm brown of his eyes that conveys that he truly understands what Nicolò has said; he knows that it is a delay at best. If she truly is the last of his family, then he must be accustomed to loss. 

With his warning given, Nicolò closes his eyes and focuses on that stream of vitality that runs through him, the thing that sets him apart from others. It doesn’t take long for him to connect to the invisible. “Grazi,” he whispers to them, grateful for their ears, even if the magic fails. It rarely does. The forces that he calls upon like him for reasons he probably will go to his grave never understanding but he appreciates it no less for the mystery. 

He begins mixing a paste with the soil (a staple of nearly every spell for him these days - the Louisiana ground itself has absorbed the magic of its people), angelica, coriander, bay leaves, and saltwater. With each item that he adds, he prays to Saint Bernardino, soft words in Latin. He imbues each with as much of his intent as he can, warning the otherworldly that he understands what they’re doing is unnatural and that he isn’t asking for much extra time, just enough for the poor lonely man with the chaotic curls and kind eyes. It would be dangerous to attempt to trick these powers and he only ever casts magic with as open a heart as he can give. 

He stands with the bowl of mud and wet herbs and turns three times widdershins, a motion contrary to the clock and to the natural, while reciting the infusion-portion of the spell. He carries the bowl to the guest bedroom and he feels Yusuf’s presence behind him, solemn and sincere. 

Without the blanket, Grace has coiled up into the fetal position, trembling as though in the dead of winter. Though she is very thin, her dark brown skin flaps loosely upon the bones of her arm and back. A collection of over-sized moles cluster on her left shoulder like a textbook photograph of melanoma warning signs. She’s crying and singing, her voice cracking on every other word. It’s a hymn that Nicolò doesn’t recognize. 

The frog in its glass cage shifts nervously. Animals are quicker to recognize magic, though its agitation could just as easily be attributed to the human shadow falling over it. 

“I need to put the mixture on her chest,” he says.

Yusuf, understanding the request, moves to the bed, and holds her, slowly pulling her arms apart. He coos to her in various languages: Arabic, French, and something Nicolò can’t place. She soothes in his grasp, allowing her chest to be exposed despite her chill. 

Nicolò prays to light forces and to powers that run the line between good and evil. He leans down and spreads the first glob of the mixture between the woman’s breasts. Her hands reach behind her to grab at Yusuf’s shoulders in a panic that he allays with the sweetness of his voice and kisses planted on her head. Nicolò creates a symbol for transfer or exchange with the magicked mud. The words of his prayer never stop, not even when he sets down the bowl and reaches into his pocket for the small Swiss Army Knife kept there. The scissors on the multi-use tool are laughably dull, but he only needs to cut her already brittle hair and he could do that with a butter knife. The strand he obtains he coats with the mixture before making his way to the frog’s jar. It skitters again as he approaches and jumps futilely when he picks the jar up. With deep concentration, he wraps the short hair around it. 

The room is charged with magical energy. He can nearly see the lines that reach between the brown paste on Grace and the severed hairs wrapped around the jar. With that connection formed, Nicolò begins to chant. It’s the same Latin words over and over, building in firmness; it’s the only time that he’s ever loud, not that his guests would know it to be out of character. He can hear her heartbeat in his extrasensory ears and it’s off-time with the thump of the frog’s jumps against the underside of the mason jar lid. The volume grows until the rhythm is like a concert, the jumps and heartbeat are drums and his chant a chorus. He closes his eyes, conducts the magic across the invisible line, one-to-one, an unnatural transfer of precious seconds. 

When the frog stops moving, Nicolò knows the spell is done. He looks at the jar. The frog is still. The exertion will be too much for it now. It has the fragility of Grace’s heart. 

His eyes move to Grace, but they catch Yusuf’s first, and he nods at the unasked question. 

“Gracey, your heart. Does it feel better? Do you feel stronger?” Yusuf asks urgently. He moves her closer still to him, and puts his ear beside her mouth, listening for her answer. 

“Jidee,” is all she says, but still Yusuf cries. He presses his head to her still-smeared chest and listens to the heartbeat for himself, hears the stronger rhythm. 

Nicolò respectfully steps out and gives them a moment. He needs to clean up anyway. 

  
  


After wiping the mixture up and tucking Grace in for a short nap, the two sneak out to the porch to watch the sunrise. Nicolò made them toast with a side of kalamata olives; not the fanciest meal, but one to ease belly rumblings. He could have added ham, but that seemed like a potentially disrespectful choice for his house guest. His toaster is cheap and inconsistent with its cooking times and he eats the blackest bit first which crunches loudly. The marionberry jam keeps only the crumbs on the top side from spraying everywhere. His and Yusuf’s shirts will need dusting off when they’re finished.

“I didn’t ask your name. I apologize for my rudeness,” says Yusuf after making quick work of the three olives. 

“You were not rude,” assuages Nicolò. If anything, the man had been impressively polite given the circumstances. He hadn’t questioned any of the odd things that Nicolò had done for the ritual and had made himself useful during it. “I’m Nicolò DeGenova.” A first name doesn’t matter much, but he has just told others here that he is Nick, for simplicity’s sake. He wants Yusuf to know his full name. 

Yusuf dips his finger in the remaining olive juice on his plate and sucks at it while staring at the horizon. “It’s finally cooling down.”

“Just in time for the day to begin again.”

“Mmm. Mornings like this almost make me miss offering _salah_. But,” he gives a wink to Nicolò, “not quite enough to get me out of bed this early.”

“My mamma would joke that I should become a Muslim, because of how often she’d find me on my knees in prayer. I think my devotion made her uncomfortable.” 

Nicolò doesn’t think about his mamma often, and speaking about her has added a weight to the air around them. He wishes he could take the words back. She has no power over him now and he won’t allow her memory to.

“Perhaps it was your potential that frightened her.” He gawks at Yusuf who misreads his surprise at the insight. “Now would you like to call me rude? I am so sorry…”

“No, it’s right. You’re right.” Nicolò waves his hand, attempting to shut down the apologies. “She was.”

He can’t help but think of her as he last saw her. She was wearing pajama bottoms, floral print thin flannel, with a button-up of his father’s that had too many holes for him to wear to work. She’d been crying for so long that her eyes were a sunburnt shade of dry and her already significant nose (he’d inherited that feature from her) was swollen and the nostrils chapped. She looked crushed. Nicolò had only the armor of his faith to shield him from the hopelessness that threatened to overwhelm him as he set to the task of packing his things into the hand-me-down lime green suitcase. She watched from the doorway with haunted eyes, but she didn’t tell him to stop. Papà didn’t face it at all, and as his son walked out the door, he never stopped watching tv. 

Hard times, the hardest he’d had in his (at the time) seventeen years of life. They’re long behind him now. He’s eighteen years and eight cities older, and he won’t let his parents’ rejection hang like a witch’s curse upon his heart. He’s embraced what they’d thrown him away for and while it may be a lonely life, he knows he’s done the best he can to help his fellow man, and that makes it all worthwhile.

“My parents died so long ago that I barely remember them,” says Yusuf. “I felt guilty, at first, when their memories blurred. I told myself stories over and over to keep from forgetting; now it’s only the stories that I remember and my parents are just characters. Who they were is lost to time.” He offers a sad half-smile at Nicolò. Maybe this lovely morning was meant for melancholy; he wasn’t able to give the old woman new life, just some stolen moments that he knows Yusuf will make the most of. 

“She must have raised you,” guesses Nicolò. “Grace.”

Yusuf looks at the partially burnt bread, considering before picking it up. He’s much less enthusiastic about the toast than the olives and Nicolò wishes he’d thought to ask if the other man wanted jam or not. “She’s been an important part of my life,” answers Yusuf cryptically. “I invited her to stay with me after the passing of her husband Micah. He ran all the errands for her when her eyesight got bad, and she doesn’t always realize he’s gone.”

“That’s very kind of you.” Growing up, Nicolò assumed he’d do the same for his parents one day, just as they’d done for his noni. “Not all family’s stick together when they should.”

The looks that he and Yusuf share are long and soft. He hasn’t confided in anyone in a very long time. While it’s uncomfortable to stretch the old injuries, it isn’t the wallowing he’s done before; it’s sharing. He catches himself looking at the smattering of mustache hairs that drape over Yusuf’s top lip, overdue for a trim. He likes Yusuf’s lips and wonders if the hairs would tickle if he kissed them. 

“Do you like living all the way out here?” 

“Yes, most of the time.”

“Do you do it so that others don’t always come to you in the night for help?” Yusuf teases. He gives Nicolò a wink, to drive home that he knows just how inconvenient he’d been, then he bites off some of the toast’s crust, the jam-less portion, and chews around a smile. 

It’s more than the camaraderie of the wink but also the adorable scrunching of his features that suddenly has Nicolò worried. It’s been a long time, too long since he’s felt his heart do the Tarantella-like dance of romantic interest; the joyous upbeat rhythm is a dangerous early warning sign. 

When he doesn’t answer, Yusuf again misunderstands his silence. “I was not meaning to pry. I’m sorry.”

“No, Yusuf, you haven’t offended me.” 

A long moment passes as they look at each other with something as magical as the ritual that had been performed earlier. Nicolò only realizes he’s holding his breath when his lungs prod him. He wants Yusuf to kiss him, wants it to be this sweet-faced man to steal the air from his chest. He might be considering it too, the way his eyes keep darting down to Nicolò's lips. He can feel those glances like the newly risen sun’s rays, warming everything they touch. 

“May I bother you again another night?” Yusuf asks. “I want to get Grace home and in her own bed, but I owe you some compensation for what you’ve done for her… for me.”

“You’re welcome to return but I need no compensation.”

“Do you have any food allergies?” 

A meal as compensation is the only kind that Nicolò is comfortable accepting and he smiles, pleased with the idea of sharing a real meal with him and not just toast and olives. “Not that I have come across.”

Yusuf nods. “Then I will return in two sunsets with a dinner that will impress even an Italian.” 

“I look forward to it,” Nicolò says. He very much means it. 


	2. Date Night

Yusuf wakes to the sound of Grace’s singing and if he still worshipped Allah, he would fall to his knees. As it is, he lies still with tears running off his nose onto his pillow and he gives all the gratitude in his heart to the healer who gave him this moment. He’d gone to church every Sunday as Eunice had demanded of him, but he’d lived too many lifetimes brought short by religion to be comfortable with the accompaniment of their children and, eventually, grandchildren. Now the lyrics to  _ Blessed Assurance _ tinkling from outside his bedroom door are more glorious than he can stand. He remembers Eunice and Eugenia singing the same song while flipping griddle cakes, Faiz on the floor practicing tying his shoelaces, and he can practically smell the breakfast and feel the crisp tight curls of his son’s hair. The tears of joy mix with tears of pain, as they do. Moment by moment, that’s how he has to live. He can’t lose himself to the memories; he must be there, so he focuses on Grace’s voice.

It’s temporary, but everything is. 

By the time he emerges from his room, she’s switched over to listening to the television while brushing her hair. “Micah?” she asks.

“No, Gracey, just Jidee.” 

She hesitates, as though she doesn’t believe him, but when he kisses the top of her head, she smiles. “I found a sermon,” she says happily, pointing at the television. 

“You should enjoy that while I make breakfast. Would you like eggs and hummus or grits?”

It’s not even light outside, because they’d slept the day away, but there’s no need to frighten her with a change to her schedule. After sleep they take a meal and she listens to her sermons and knits. In the evening they take a meal and he reads to her and she complains about her aches and pains, or she thinks that he’s Micah and complains about his snoring. Sometimes she cries about the children she lost before birthing and his heart breaks for how acutely she feels that old pain. Evenings are tough, but they tire her out and she goes to sleep early, often just past sunset. In the early days of her convalescence, the doctors had given her sleep aids, but when her heart got bad, they insisted she might not ever wake up again. It could be worse; so far, she’s been very easy to care for.

“I want grits and eggs.” 

Yusuf laughs. “I see my beloved  _ hafida _ has an appetite this morning.” 

“I feel very good. I liked that doctor.” 

He’s surprised. He wasn’t sure how cognizant of her surroundings she was during the spell. She’d been so child-like on the naked mattress, shivering and blind. Anyone would want to protect her in that state, and he’s very lucky that the healer had. “He did a good job,” he responds. “You couldn’t see it, but he had beautiful eyes.”

“What color were they?”

“Blue like the ice on a pond when the sun hits it.”

She sets her hair brush down with a shaky hand. Many strands have come off into it. If she notices how little is left to brush, she’s never said. In a way, the deterioration of her mind is a blessing; how terrifying it would be if she knew how close to the end she really is. “You can take me to him again for my arthritis,” she asserts. 

“I’ll keep your permission in mind, but first, I think I shall make you some grits.” 

As he walks to the kitchen, he hears her call, “And eggs!”

His glee at her lively demand is tempered by how much she’d sounded like her grandmother. She’s the last part of his dear departed wife left. After Grace goes, Eunice will fade like Nadira and Julien, names with vague essences that hover around him like shadows. ‘One day at a time’, he reminds himself and sets to work making their very late breakfast.

  
  


Living in the moment becomes harder for different reasons as the hours tick away to his dinner with Nicolò. The pull that he’d felt towards the healer had been irresistible and somehow he’d suggested a date even while his head was screaming at him that he couldn’t survive falling in love with a mortal one more time. He’d sworn never to do it again after Eunice, but that was over 60 years ago, and he hadn’t known that he’d hear the lovely Italian accent fall from lips as gorgeous as to have been sculpted by the most talented Renaissance artist, let alone that those lips would cast a spell to fix his grandchild’s heart. He’d been dumbstruck by the man’s beauty, kindness, and soft-spoken nature. He couldn’t help but to ask, even knowing that he’s opening himself up to more pain. At least they can’t have children together. But that’s putting the cart way too far ahead of the horse. He’s still preparing the meal, loading it into separate containers while their neighbor Leslie watches.

“I’ve never seen you take a woman out,” says Leslie, his finger dipping into the cooling remains inside one of the four pots on the stovetop. He’s watched over Grace a few times before. Each time Yusuf gives him money at the end of the night which he accepts, but he’s mostly helping to be a good neighbor. 

“Actually, my date is with a man,” corrects Yusuf, grateful that this time and place allows for honesty in such issues. He’d caught a good moment in time with Julien as well, though France in his experience had always been more forthright about its sexual proclivities. His dark skin had caused considerably more strife in their relationship than their penis ownership. “And, I haven’t been on one in years.”

Leslie’s eyes widen dramatically and long enough to make Yusuf worry that the man is choking on the small amount of food he’d found in the pot. “You’re kidding. Huh. Didn’t know you were gay.”

“Is that a problem?” He’d rather stand up his beautiful future heartbreak than to put Grace at risk if it is. 

“Oh, no. I don’t have a problem with gay guys. Leaves more ladies for us, right?” Leslie laughs but it’s forced. The tension between them isn’t assisted in the right direction by Leslie’s continued blathering to fill the quiet. “I have a gay nephew, actually. You should have told me and I could have set you up. He dates real SOBs though. You’re probably too good for him, taking care of your grandma and all.”

So, it’s obviously something that makes Leslie uncomfortable, but it’s not going to be anything that puts Grace at risk. Yusuf can live with that. “I’ll have my ringer on full volume. If she has trouble sleeping, you can give her one of the sleeping pills I put on her nightstand. They’re expired, but they’ll help if she starts confusing you with Micah.”

“I’m sure we’ll be just fine. You have a nice time on your man date.” Leslie chuckles at the words’ similarity to ‘mandate’ while holding the door open for Yusuf who is balancing the remaining food containers (his third load to the car) like an experienced bus boy. It’s best if he doesn’t raise Grace’s anxiety by saying goodbye, but it always leaves him feeling guilty, like he’s sneaking out. He stacks the food in the passenger seat creating a large warm tower and wraps a protective seat belt around it to keep it from sliding. Well, off he goes, for better or worse. His stomach is filled with ancient butterflies that have forgotten how to fly and just sort of crash into each other. He really must be some kind of idiot to invite the cycle all over again. 

  
  


At the door, his kindly date rescues his arms from total collapse under the weight of all the dishes and the struggle of balancing them all. It had been touch and go for a few moments while crossing the soggy stretch of land that led from the road, but his years spent juggling in  Sarandīb had come back to him and even with an unexpected mudpuddle or two, he’d kept their food dry. Together, the two of them lay out the dishes onto the same table where Nicolò had prepared the ingredients for Grace’s spell.  It’s got a different tablecloth on it, frillier and presumably free of disgusting magical ingredients. It’s awkward, moving around each other getting the obscene banquet to fit. “Maybe I made too much,” laughs Yusuf as Nicolò shimmies a glassware dish to the very edge of the table. “I wanted to show you my gratitude, not break your table.”

A smile gleams in one gorgeous pale eye and at the corner of a kissable lip. “It’s more solid than it looks.”

They both look much more presentable than the last time they saw each other: shaved or trimmed beards, freshly applied deodorant, and frog-mud-free shirts. Yusuf is lucky that Nicolò agreed to dine with him tonight given how he must have looked carrying his dying granddaughter through the swamp in the middle of the night. It’s a rare man that can see dating potential in someone who looks as though they should be holding a “the end is nigh” sign in a crowded city square. Nicolò is just amazingly handsome. He had been that night and he still is this one. Even knowing how fleeting beauty is, Yusuf can’t help how his body or mind reacts (intermittently firm interest and bursts of romantic poetry respectively) to Nicolò as he looks now. Somehow despite the awkwardness, the chemistry is still there, anticipatory and heated. 

As he rolls back the aluminium foil off the dishes, his host makes an appreciative sound.

“This looks amazing, Yusuf.”

If Nicolò says his name again, he’s going to suggest they skip the meal entirely and set to work devouring each other. 

“You shouldn’t judge meals by their appearance,” he chides.

Nicolò smiles. “May I judge it by its smell? Because it smells amazing too.”

“You may only judge it by taste.” 

It’s all so playful and joyous. Yusuf cannot remember the last time he felt so youthful. 

The silverware is already on the table and they hunt around for them beneath all the meal options. It’s nothing short of ridiculous.

Seafood paella of pinkish hue with matching shrimp popping up throughout; pierogies bursting with potato and green onion with piles of homemade sauerkraut;  shakshouka with imperfect circles of eggs blooming like flowers; rendang so steeped in lemongrass, garlic, turmeric, and other assorted spices that one would be hard pressed to identify the beef within the flavors. These are just the main dishes. Side dishes of couscous and falafel, gurkensalat, red rice, and maple bacon brussel sprouts squeeze in between the large platters on the table. For dessert, he’d purchased beignets, not needing to create his own when the best in the world were less than six miles from his home though they will have cooled down far too much in the commute. 

“You’ve brought me a sampling of the world, Yusuf!” Nicolò exclaims with obvious pleasure.

If only his beard grew over his cheek bones, it could hide the pink spreading there, but Yusuf chooses to duck his head instead, turning self-deprecating in defense. “I always tend towards too much. I’ve been told I am physically incapable of not going overboard.” His downward glance doesn’t last long because as silly as he’s feeling, the expression of awe on his gorgeous companion’s face is worth it. 

“In which country should I begin?” Nicolò asks.

  
  


They sit and digest on the porch in a haze of cigar smoke. Each man holds a glass of wine, Yusuf’s fourth, and they pass one cigar back and forth between them, working the unlit end with unintentionally suggestive suction. Hopefully this is a rare vice for the Italian, because the smoke is bad for mortal lungs, and he already knows he wants Nicolò to live the longest life possible. Other than the swamp life, it’s quiet; no honking cars or yelling neighbors. They pass fifteen, maybe twenty minutes in serene silence. They watch the various insects land on the outside of the porch netting desperate to be near the lantern light. The evening breeze is cooler than it has been the past few nights. 

Yusuf feels many contradictory emotions but they’re not battling. Instead, they cuddle up comfortably together. The low heat in his belly stoked by the hope of lovemaking is mitigated by the fullness caused by the indulgent meal that Nicolò had praised and by the peaceful way they are sitting together as though they’ve shared a lifetime instead of two evenings. 

“Do you believe in love at first sight, Nicolò?” He looks up from the cigar in his hand, his eyebrows lifting playfully. 

Cool blue circles half-hidden by heavy eyelids regard him. They’re sitting close to each other, but their bodies aren’t touching. Nicolò's upper lip quirks up, almost like a snarl rather than a smile. “I believe in a lot of things.” 

Yusuf doesn’t even mind the vagueness of the answer, because he likes it anyway, likes its smooth unconcerned delivery. He leans over slowly, and Nicolò meets him halfway, full lips earnest and every bit as soft as they’d looked. He’s immediately swept up in Nicolò's kisses, mouth open and eager, and when he feels a hand grab the front of the shirt pulling him closer, Yusuf thinks to himself that this is true passion. How had he gone so long without this feeling? Though his stomach is full, he is like a starving man licking at the tobacco-flavored tongue and nibbling at the delicacy of lips and mouth corners. He groans when Nicolò bites down on his lip. His hands are on either side of the healer’s face, thumbs stroking the freshly-shaven cheeks. It’s so good. Nicolò's hand scrambles higher, gripping at collar and then collar bone, the small patch of chest revealed by the top button that Yusuf had debated with himself about for at least five minutes of his dressing time. Soon enough, Nicolò's mouth slides its way down his neck making for that exposed spot that he is oh so glad he chose to leave so, and he moans unabashedly. 

He can’t remember what happened to the drink in his hand and for all he knows the cigar is on the wooden porch igniting a fire that will leave Nicolò homeless; all he cares about are the teeth on his collarbone and the slender still-covered shoulders underneath his claw-like grip. “Nicky, yes…” he sighs. 

The bites turn to loose toothy kisses as Nicolò begins to smile. He looks up at Yusuf. “Nicky?” he asks with amusement.

“Sorry, do you hate nicknames?” It had just slipped out. He hadn’t meant to be disrespectful. Fuck, he’s so intoxicated by lust and, to a much lesser extent, the wine, he’s lucky he hadn’t said worse. He’s only had a taste of the man and he’s already near swearing lifelong fealty to him. “It just came out. I’m sorry.”

“I haven’t been called Nicky for a very long time. I don’t mind.” He kisses Yusuf softly and briefly. “Would you like to go to my room?”

“There’s nowhere I would rather go.”

The cigar, it turns out, is still in Nicolò's hand, and already fizzled out. Yusuf still doesn’t remember setting the wine down, even after he sees its final resting place on the porch. Lust amnesia; he’s suffered worse fates. The two make their way like mischievous children, pawing at each other the short distance to the bedroom. Unlike the austere guest room where he’d treated Grace, Nicolò's bedroom is more homey with dark wood furniture, framed artwork, and shelves of mementos, not that Yusuf can be bothered to take in the decor with the delicious man unbuttoning Yusuf’s shirt and licking any skin that appeals, neck, lips, or ears. Yusuf grabs his waist and falls back onto the mattress pulling the healer down on top of him. 

The kisses turn his insides to liquid, the dexterity of Nicolò's tongue showing more skill than his trembling hands as they yank the unbuttoned shirt off with the help of an arch of Yusuf’s back. He should try and get Nicolò naked, but he can’t seem to keep his hands off of the sharp cheekbones, his thumb moving to the corners of his mouth occasionally receiving an errant lick from their kisses. He would be happy just kissing all night, feeling this lightheaded rush of arousal without ever finding a conclusion. It isn’t that there isn’t urgency, but he’s just so happy to be doing this, to be in the bed of a man so gorgeous and kind that the minutiae of what they do there doesn’t matter much. 

Nicolò’s ethereal pale eyes grow wide as he studies the skin he’s just unwrapped. 

“Yusuf, how do you hide all these muscles?” Nicolò asks in innocent awe.

Yusuf can’t help but laugh at the words which could be insulting if it wasn’t for the tone and the hands already gliding over his chest. Something about his giving nature or his familial dedication seems to exclude anyone from thinking him as strong as he is. He needs something to do with his days now that his wife and kids have all grown old and passed away; the gym is as good a place as any to burn off grief and boredom. Though now he can think of other ways to distract himself. 

As Nicolò realizes his words were rude, Yusuf rolls him over onto his back, swapping their positions. “Do you not like them?”

Beneath him, Nicolò pushes his thick lips together in an amused pout. “I did not say that.”

“Say that you do then.” He begins to undo the shirt’s buttons, ready to put the Italian into a state of undress similar to his own, only his hands continue on once he reaches their end, moving along to the two buttons on Nicolò's pants. He runs one finger down the firmness behind the zipper and Nicolò gasps, fabric lurching with a pulse. 

Yusuf moves lower, running his open mouth along the front of the trouser’s fly, mouthing at the shape of Nicolò's cock and breathing warm puffs of exhalation against it. He raises his fingers to the zipper and before giving it a tug asks “And what do  _ you _ keep hidden?” To his surprised pleasure, there’s no underwear to be found behind the parted teeth of the zipper, just a lovely cock reaching towards his touch like a flower growing towards the sun. Nicolò wiggles and sighs as he gently strokes down from the top to where it disappears beneath the dark fabric of the trousers. His mouth is very close, but he keeps just petting it gently, allowing the anticipation to grow. He very much wants to lick every part of Nicolò, not just inches of revealed skin. “May I take these off?” he asks, tugging on the ankle of the pants. 

“I grant you permission to do anything you want,” sighs Nicolò contentedly. 

It makes Yusuf laugh, the excessive free-rein, but the demonstration of trust is endearing. He removes the pants which are blessedly loose-fitting and crisp; they probably don’t get worn often as there are few social events to attend in the swamp. He’s already barefoot; they both are. He grips one ankle and just studies Nicolò's body. He would very much like to draw this man, but only after having sated his reality-blurring lust, a hindrance to accurate portraiture. 

“Yusuf…” says Nicolò and Yusuf is sure that he’s stared too long, but there are words on the other man’s tongue, ones that he can almost see. “It has… been a while.” 

Again he can’t help but laugh, his hands reaching out to trace along pathways of skin as he does. What would this child know of extended periods of abstinence? It was before Nicolò had even been born, the last time he’d shared intimacy with someone else. “Oh, has it been months?” asks Yusuf, unable to resist mocking. He drags his beard up Nicolò's thighs stopping just short of the blood-filled cock with its left-angled tilt. He puffs a warm breath on it, watches it twitch. 

“More than a year.” 

One year. It’s a blink of an eye, one short trip around the sun. His tongue licks the ruby skin jutting forth from the stretched foreskin like a shiny jewel. “It has been much longer for me than a year.” He holds the dick in place, tweaking its position so that his mouth can slide straight down onto it. Beneath him, Nicolò's body lurches and he inhales sharply, expecting more teasing and caught off guard by the encompassing warmth. Yusuf holds his mouth still, enjoying the unique combination of rigidity and softness but his hands roam, traveling over hips and stomach. Like a blind man reading braille, he tracks the moles or rigid patches of skin that could be scars or recent abrasions. He sucks lightly, swallowing around the firmness so that his throat strokes the head of Nicolò's penis. It earns him a pleasant moan, a much nicer soundtrack than the sound of horny frogs and the buzzing generator. 

When Nicolò's hands touch his head, it’s with soft, almost timid pressure. “Is this okay?” he asks. 

If the man gets anymore endearing, Yusuf will be unable to do anything other than worship at his feet. He slides his mouth off of Nicolò's cock in order to reply, but he replaces his hand over it, stroking lightly. “I wish I could extend blanket permission for you as well, but I am quite ticklish and must, for both our sakes, warn you away from any light touches to my feet, lower back, and sides. Otherwise, I encourage you to touch anything else that catches your interest.” 

“Everything of yours catches my interest, but…” he says with an amused lilt. “I’ll tread carefully over ticklish areas.”

Yusuf’s tongue traces the areas of skin between his fingers, little triangles of the skin on Nicolò's shaft. He licks lower where his pinky abuts the cushioned weight of balls. He pushes them aside with his chin, licking that small patch of sensitive flesh behind them. Nicolò shudders. The musky taste is a long forgotten one, but delightfully, his body still remembers how to react to it. His hands slide under Nicolò's ass cheeks, tilting his hips upwards. His lover accommodates beautifully, widening his legs without being asked so that Yusuf’s tongue can reach his hole, balls balancing on his nose. His face is surrounded by scent and sensation and he dives in as eagerly as Nicolò had to the dinner he’d brought. Though the sounds are muffled by thighs, he can hear the Italian’s lovely gasps. The hole clenches and twitches as he laves it with broad flat strokes. Nicolò's body speaks the same language of consent as his lips, an enthusiastic desire for Yusuf’s touch. 

When he adds the tip of one finger, pushing gently to test its give, Nicolò nearly shouts a curse. Together with his tongue, his finger explores and encourages. The grip is tight enough around his knuckle at first that he mentally writes off actual penetrative sex for tonight; it’s not the worst possibility - he wants to do a million things with Nicolò, not just this one thing. But it’s not tension or too tight of muscles, just hunger, because his ass doesn’t seem to want to let go even of just the one finger and when, after a brief but awkward scramble to add lube (kept in a drawer near the bed along with a butt plug, condoms, and a sizeable pile of sage bundles), Yusuf adds a second one, the accommodation is immediate, and the moans louder.

He fucks his fingers in and out of Nicolò, sucking gently at his balls and eventually, working his mouth back over his cock with loose lips. It’s damp and sweet with precum and he’s so hard that his foreskin barely moves when he sucks from root to tip. 

“Yusuf….Yusuf…” He takes the name as an endearment, but then when the hand on his head tightens, he realizes it’s a warning. He backs off, looking up into the piece of art that is Nicolò's face. 

“Are you alright?”

The sweet man laughs. “I am more than that, but as I said, it’s been a long time.” His fingers run down Yusuf’s chin, making trails in the saliva and bodily fluids. 

“I’ll give you anything, Nicky. What do you want?” 

He worries as a silence lingers that he’s been too intense, but maybe it only feels like a long time because he can’t read his lover’s gorgeous face. “I like you saying my name,” he says quietly.

“Nicky, would you like me to continue?”

“Make love to me.” 

Yusuf chuckles. “I thought that’s what I was doing.” He nibbles on one of the slender thighs near his mouth. 

“Not that way…”  
He can hear the hesitation, the shyness in the response. It makes him feel more daring, as though it hasn’t been half a lifetime since he’d done these things. It’s a wonderful sensation, like so many of those he’s shared with Nicky tonight. His fingers are still warmly clenched inside of his lover, unmoving, but he raises himself up higher so that his mouth is just underneath Nicky’s strong jaw. He wiggles his fingers and asks, “You want me inside you, Nicky?” 

The “yes, please,” is mixed with a moan, creating a compellingly genuine request, and Yusuf is more than happy to fulfill it. 

There’s so little flexibility for just his two fingers in the tightness that he’s not even sure such a thing is possible. His dick size is on the smaller end, not anything inhibiting or embarrassing, but the way that Nicky’s clamped down, he imagines it could be painful for both of them. “You’ll have to relax if I’m to fit.” He’s not sure how such a factual statement sounds so dirty. 

Nicky inhales deeply. On the exhale, he feels the muscles relax, surprisingly so, like magic. Yusuf’s impressed. “So full of talents,” he whispers, nuzzling into the strong bone of jaw. A quick spasm of tightness lets him know that Nicky enjoyed the praise. He’d forgotten how much one can communicate in acts of intimacy. Every pull on his fingers, every raised bump of gooseflesh, every shudder of delight speaks sentences, but more succinct and honest. 

He adds more lubricant and another finger and Nicky whines, pushing his pelvis harder onto Yusuf’s hand. His need is endearing, but it doesn’t encourage Yusuf to rush. Individual moments like this are to be savoured, regardless how many more he intends to share with this new love if given the opportunity. His free hand plays with Nicky’s balls, tuggling softly, juggling them, and his teeth worry at his collar bone, creating a love bite there that will last for days. 

“Yusuf…please.” 

“Tired of my fingers already?” he teases. 

“ _ Cazzo _ .”

Yusuf genuinely doesn’t know if the Italian means the word as a demand or an insult, but either pleases him. He reaches for more lube and strokes it down his cock before realizing something that his brain should be too sex-addled to work out. The condoms in the drawer flash into his head. He’s never actually used a condom before. He’d been married when they first became fashionable and though he doesn’t remember the exact years, he thinks that Eunice might have already been barren by the time that anyone he knew was using them. They’re everywhere now though. After the AIDS epidemic, even pornographic movies started using them. 

“What’s wrong?” Nicky asks and he realizes he’s been sitting there wondering for too long.

“I think I should use a condom?” It’s a statement with an upward tilt. He’s uncertain what the protocols are these days. He’s very out-of-touch with sex trends.

“They’re in the drawer.”

Right, question answered. He was supposed to use a condom. The box was shiny gold and eye catching, luckily enough for him as it may have very well prevented a huge breach of modern protocol, and he pulls out not just one but an entire strip. He blinks at them. He must just tear off a square. He should have researched this. He tries to tear one off at the little perforations, but his hands are too slick with lubricant. 

Nicky saves him by grabbing the strip and tearing into one, pulling out the small rubbery circle. He smiles. “My hands were dry…” he says offering Yusuf an excuse for his fumbling. The thing is that even with the circle, he’s unsure. Nicky must catch his uncertainty, because he takes the initiative, grabbing at Yusuf’s temporarily half-hearted erection and unrolling the condom from the tip down to the root with smooth persuasive fingers. The warm look on his face as he does so makes the moment less awkward. 

It’s an unusual sensation, having a little latex cover over his penis, but it’s fine. He doubts they’d be as popular as they are if they were actually uncomfortable. It’s sort of quaint in its novelty. 

The mood turns softer, with deep slow kissing, and he hates that his fingers are too goopy to touch the wonderful planes of Nicky’s face. Nicky’s hands roam about in his curls. His breath gets heavier as their tongues become more assertive, and soon he’s back to that needy pitch he’d been at before they’d stopped for protection. 

“Nicky…” he whispers. “May I make love to you now?” Silly because everything they’ve done this evening, down to their conversation about various parts of the world has been part of the lovemaking experience, but it’s close enough to how Yusuf is feeling. 

“Please,” Nicolò asks again. 

Slowly and well-slicked, he moves inside Nicky, watching his face for any signs of stress in his features that could indicate discomfort. When his lover shuts his eyes tight, he stops though he’s not quite in all the way, and Nicky startles. “No, keep going. Please.”

His desperation is the sweetest fruit like a bursting overripe plum. Yusuf wants to consume Nicky, let that sweet need drip down his chin. He obeys, sinking into the warm squeeze with reverence. Nicky is not too tight as he’d feared, but the grip is strong enough to remind him how long its been, pushing his orgasm closer than it should for just one thrust. He hesitates.

“More,” whines Nicky.

Yusuf chuckles breathily. “A moment,  _ bello _ . It has been long for me as well.”

They stay close together while he slides slowly in and out, his supporting forearms hooked under Nicky’s arms and their lips touching in an open-mouthed exchange of breath. Occasionally, one of their tongues sweeps the other’s mouth as Yusuf’s hips remember the movement and proper rhythm. Nicky makes lovely sounds and he tries to ignore his own primal grunts which sound so ineloquent by comparison.

“You are amazing. How have I found you?” In a world overflowing with people, how did this one miracle enter his life? “Nicky, so kind and so warm.” 

Nicky’s eyes find his and he sees deep down into his soul, sees the pleasure they are sharing, the respect, the appreciation. Yusuf sees the good and the benevolent, the fierce and the eager. All are there in the pale glass beneath him. 

He adjusts his position, their bodies farther away, a necessary but sad thing, in order to touch Nicky and stroke him to release, but his hand is slapped away immediately, and surprisingly strong hands pull him back down. “I don’t need that. Yusuf, I’m close. Please, stay deep in me.”

Oh Lord. The words and the sensation, the sweet desperate pull, and Yusuf bites his own lip as he tries very hard to grind the orgasm out of Nicky without pulling it out of himself as well. There’s a tremor that starts in Nicky’s legs, and his hands grasp at Yusuf’s back, and it’s when the fingers really dig in, tiny well-trimmed nails rooted to his skin, that he finally loses control. He pushes harder into Nicky, faster, and he’s coming like a man who hasn’t had a bedmate in decades, with a clawing greed deep in his chest. He holds tight to Nicky and they both jerk and shake and cry out together, finding the stable points in the hurricane of their passion. They ride it together, each spasm reciprocated like an echo of feeling until finally it stills and they are left panting, recovering, and remaining tightly woven together with limbs and emotions.

  
  
  


He’s behind Nicky, one arm over his hip. He’s noting things about him like the way the ends of his hair tweak upwards behind his ear. It’s still too warm in the room, though it’s been at least a half hour since their lovemaking ended, and the faint night breeze does nothing to take away their sweat or the other juices with which they’re covered. He kisses one shoulder. “I need to get back to Grace.” He feels like a heel for leaving so soon, but if the man he’s already fallen hard for is half as caring as he seems, he’ll understand. “I have a neighbor watching her for now.”

“But she’s singing again…”

Yusuf smiles. “She’s not the only one.” He runs a hand through the thin slick sweat on Nicky’s back. “You have many kinds of magic, Nicky. All your spells have worked.”

Nicky shivers and he can feel the goosebumps push against the soft pads of his fingertips. Yusuf wants to go again. He doesn’t think he could ever have enough. Sometimes he feels the years so acutely that he gets surprised by the young reflection that greets him in his mirror; now, though, he feels like he’s still in his thirties, newly in love and insatiable. 

He tugs at Nicky’s shoulder, rolling him onto his back so that their eyes meet when he asks, “Would you join me for dinner at my place sometime?”

“Shouldn’t it be my turn to cook?” asks Nicky, amused. Yes, he’d gone overboard with the spread, but the benevolent Italian hadn’t exactly shown reservation in his consumption either, and Yusuf can take a little teasing. 

“If you come over, I wouldn’t have to leave your side to check on her. You could stay in my bed all night and I could show you my appreciation over and over again.” He kisses at Nicky’s neck, pulse there leaping up onto his lips. 

“I would hope this is not just about gratitude. You didn’t even owe me the meal.”

“What if I want to just appreciate who you are? A kind man with long talented fingers who makes exquisite sounds….” His hand drifts lower and Nicky groans, proving his point.

He’d told Leslie he’d return “around midnight,” and it’s already close to that without the drive back. Yusuf is a man of two minds, one large and underutilized, the other small and underutilized. 

“Let me check in with Leslie, and see if I can stay a bit longer…”  
“No, go back to Grace now. I’ll come and see you.”

“You will?” he asks with elation. He gives Nicky several quick happy kisses. “When?”

“As soon as you want,” Nicky says.

“Come home with me tonight.” It’s heartfelt and he holds his breath, hopeful that he’ll say yes. 

“You are an impetuous man.” Something about the way the words play on Nicky’s lips makes him think that it’s a compliment; he’s sure that there’s a grin behind them, even if it’s hidden.

Yusuf nods. “I am,” he says, in between a burst of kisses he can’t resist giving. “But you’ve said you do believe in love at first sight, so perhaps it isn’t something you dislike?”

“I don’t dislike it.”

“Come back with me. I have air conditioning.” 

Yusuf knows that it isn’t the promise of cooler air (a wonder of the modern era that he is still in awe of) that gets the yes from Nicky’s lips. It’s the way that their hearts have already beaten in sync tonight, a deep soulful percussion too loud to ignore. He’s never fallen this deep this quick, and it should scare him, the idea of starting the cycle of pain over again, but it doesn’t. It feels out of his control, like fate has a more commanding idea than he does. It’s easy to bow to its will when the very smell of Nicolò is somehow like coming home. 

His actual arrival home is terribly awkward. Leslie, who had only hours earlier discovered that his genial next door neighbor was a homosexual, handles meeting Yusuf’s same-sex date with a clunky attempt at tolerance. Yusuf isn’t so much concerned for himself (much of his life such unions would be met with violence rather than feigned acceptance) but for Nicky who is so young and demure. He has no desire to scare the man off with a glimpse of the pitfalls that a relationship with him could bring. Luckily, it is so late that socially-enforced pleasantries are kept brief and Leslie doesn’t have to pretend to be in a hurry to get into his own bed; his eyes are moist with stirred yawn tears and he stretches noisily as he walks out onto the front step. 

Yusuf moved into this house after Eunice died. It would have seemed strange to his neighbors for him to have stayed on following her death, but he was compelled to for his sanity’s sake, feeling like he was drowning in the smell of her convalescence no matter how hard he scrubbed. When Grace moved back in and the cycle started again, he began thinking perhaps he should have stayed at the old place back on Maplethorpe. A reminder for the thousandth time that fate can’t really be avoided and no one but he ever cheats death. 

Nicky silently examines the contents of the house, moving slowly and with care. It’s not a judgmental search; he can see the curiosity on the sweet man’s face. He spends extra time on the large drawing he’d done of his family back in the early 50’s. He’d been able to work from a photograph rather than making them all sit still and he’d spent over a year on it, refining until he could practically see the pulses of the veins around their wrists. He’d felt some embarrassment at its size but drawing his family in that level of detail was no small endeavor, and they’d loved their depictions even if, as Eunice claimed, he drew her through rose-colored glasses. 

“Now you’ll think me vain,” Yusuf jokes, feeling insecure about the family portrait all over again. It hadn’t needed to take up so much room and he probably had drawn his chin wider than it really was. 

Low-lidded eyes turn upon him. “This is your art?”

He nods. He’s glad nothing remains of his early attempts in learning to draw, one thing he’s happy to see lost to the sands of time. 

Nicky reaches up his hand and gently as though stroking an angry animal, his fingertips brush the glass covering the paper. “ _ Che incredibile _ ,” he sighs. “They’re so detailed. How do you do this?”

It fills him with pride and gratitude, having such a wonderful person praise his work, even while he can feel warmth in his cheeks. He reaches out for Nicky, carefully turning him by the elbow and wrapping his arms around his waist. “You’re incredible. If you let me, I’ll draw you...If you’re not too tired of having artists begging you to pose for them.”

A skeptical expression flits across Nicky’s face, followed by a brief shaking of his head. Men as attractive as he should never feel any self-doubt. Or it could just be that he’d found the come on too overt. They don’t know each other well enough for Yusuf to know for certain. Either way, he kisses the silent refutation off Nicky’s lips. 

Their kiss is interrupted by the healer’s huge spontaneous yawn which devolves into quiet laughter - neither wants to wake Grace. Yusuf jokes, “Ah, I’m losing my touch already,” with a large grin to let him know that there is no actual offense taken. “Shall I show you where my bed is?”

“Yes, take me to bed again,” says Nicky, and yawn or not, Yusuf obeys. 


	3. Magic and Medicine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has potentially triggering content to those who have lost loved ones to Covid. If you feel that it might be, please skip to chapter 4 where I will summarize the contents of this chapter.

The fifth morning of Nicolò's impromptu stay at Yusuf’s home begins as all the others - with Grace singing hymns in front of the muted television as the sun clears the horizon, its rays revealing more and more of the bedroom and the parts of his lover’s muscular body not snuggled under down comforter. Today he watches everything transpire with some wistfulness. He must return home today. He has things to do; no matter how much he’d like to stay on this sex and food holiday until they are both wrinkled old men. He’ll come back soon, though, maybe in a week or two. He’ll bring more clothes with him so that he won’t have to borrow Yusuf’s. Or maybe he won’t. He loves smelling like Yusuf all day, wishes they bottled the scent of him so that he could spray it around his swamp home. 

He’s not the only one that needs to get back to regular life. A neighbor had come by to check on Yusuf, since he hadn’t been seen at the community garden recently. Apparently, he’d started the neighborhood endeavor himself, raised funds and interests in a communal space for growing fruits and vegetables. This sort of selflessness is not surprising in the least, nor the idea that he would have a green thumb. Yusuf is so full of life, so warm and friendly, he couldn’t imagine anyone, even plants, not responding to his infectious zeal for the prettiest aspects of the world.

He twirls one of Yusuf’s errant curls around his finger. If their spontaneous life plans come to fruition (he doesn’t doubt either of their intentions, but respects that the world has its own designs the like of which mere mortals can’t overturn), he will ask him to grow the hair longer. He wants to feel it around his face and neck when they make love, wants it to drape away the rest of the world so it is just the two of them, forever.

Nicolò is irreversibly, maddeningly in love. 

“You’re thinking if you cut my hair, I shall become weak like Samson,” mumbles Yusuf. 

Nicolò can’t get enough of Yusuf’s muscles, the way they feel, the ease with which he can lift and maneuver him around the bed; it hadn’t been what he’d expected but now that he’s been spoiled by them, he’s not sure he could bear to lose them. Nicolò is no Delilah. “If you grew it longer, would you become even stronger?”

A hand beneath the covers glides over Nicolò's morning-hard cock and he catches his breath. Oh, to wake up like this every morning. 

“If that’s a request, I’ll do it. I could become stronger for you.” 

“I’ll be pleased with the longer hair alone.” Yusuf’s hand is stroking in soft encouraging motions. His eyes smile as they always do, incandescent when they’re doing something sensual and affectionate when they’re not. 

“That is a much simpler request,  _ amore mio _ .” The words cause greater impact to his heart than they would in English. He likes it best when Yusuf says endearments in Arabic, as though this new passion is something ingrained like a native tongue.

His chin nudges Nicolò's neck, so he tips it back, lets teeth and tongue and lips play where they will as he loses himself to sensation. They travel lower, leaving a path of worshipful saliva behind as Yusuf vanishes beneath the covers, head bulge traveling like a cartoon to his destination. The warm mouth that engulfs him is like the sun, too much good, too bright. He covers his eyes with his wrist and lays there lazily enjoying his lover’s attentions. It doesn’t take long in the morning, even for all the excess usage he’s put his body through the past few days, and Yusuf’s blowjob skills are otherworldly. He’ll have to pay more attention someday to the details of what he does. For now, he just floats along, feeling his orgasm fast approaching.

“Yusuf…” He feels the two syllables of the name like a honey on his tongue. It’s less a warning than praise, for every time he’s done this, Yusuf has swallowed everything down rather than pulling off. Nicolò has never slept with someone as eager to share all, taking and giving, as his new love. It’s that same passion he shows for life condensed down to its purest form. 

Five days, that’s all, and Nicolò knows he wants a million more.

Yusuf emerges from the sheets with puffy moist lips. He works himself to a finish, body jerking against Nicolò, warmth splashing on his leg and the bedsheets. Nicolò licks a thin layer of sweat off his forehead before kissing him. The taste is more sour than he likes; he’s not a fan of his own juices, but he loves losing himself in that mouth anyway. 

“All I do these days is laundry,” whispers Yusuf. 

“And me.” 

They both laugh. 

Grace’s singing has tapered off sometime during the adventure, so it will be time to make her breakfast. Yusuf had let him yesterday, so that he wouldn’t feel so useless, but he’d seemed uncomfortable with someone else taking that particular chore. Perhaps today he can figure out how to work the laundry machine. No, he’d already told himself he would go home. Just as he’d told himself last night. 

“I should leave after breakfast,” says Nicolò.

“But you’ll come back to me.”

“Everytime.”

The slightly crooked teeth in Yusuf’s smile make it more childlike, conveying his happiness more than plain old straight teeth would. “Will you return tomorrow?”

Nicolò shakes his head. He must put his foot down. He’s got too much to do, too many duties he’s been neglecting in order to escape into this bliss. He’s been away too long already. “I was thinking that I could return in a week.”

“A week is forever,” sighs Yusuf, his arms tightening around Nicolò as though he intends to keep him there by octopus-like force. 

He doesn’t mind. 

“You have things to see to as well, Mr. Al-Kaysani. As much as I would like to share your bed indefinitely.” 

“Is it too soon to ask you to move in?”

Nicolò feels his heart thud in his chest. He’s been so happy in his swampy home, isolated but learning; at times he’s felt like a Buddhist monk on a high mountain peak alone just honing his craft. It would be such a drastic change, living with someone, living with someone and their grandmother. “Not too soon,” he answers, because he already knows that it isn’t Yusuf himself that’s making him hesitate, but the change in his life situation. He’s enjoyed being a hermitous medicine man in the bayou. The role has fit him better than any other that he has donned since his family cast him out. 

“I am being selfish. Forgive me, dear one. Let me get dressed and set to work preparing our breakfast.” He starts to roll away but Nicolò places a hand on his arm. 

He doesn’t want that to be the end of the conversation. He wants the option to be there in the future. “Have you ever considered living away from the city?” he asks.

“I would live in a cave with you, Nicky, but my Gracey, she needs to stay here where she is near doctors and in a home that she trusts and knows.”

Nicolò thinks of the frog’s heart, the essence of which he’d traded for Grace’s. As much as he would have liked to extend her life infinitely, he’d only bought her months, certainly less than a year. Sad as it is to think, her life will not be an impediment to cohabitation for long. They can live together, just not right away. 

“I understand.” 

Yusuf scans carefully, finds nothing but sincerity in the response, and presses his forehead to Nicolò's sweetly. “Would you like any eggs or hummus?”

He’s never one to eat breakfast but their activities over the past few days have burned off more calories than he’s used to expending, so again he accepts the offer of food way before he could normally stomach anything but coffee. 

When they emerge from Yusuf’s room after a quick wet wash cloth rinse off, Grace is all smiles at them. Even in her advanced age, Nicolò can tell she must have lived up to her name. “It’s morning, Jidee.” 

“It is!” he says, greeting her with a kiss to the top of her head. “Sorry, I overslept again.” He snatches up the remote controls from a table, pulling up her religious networks for her. 

Nicolò isn’t sure how much she understands about his presence there. She likes him well enough, asking him roughly the same questions every day (what country he is from with his “exotic” accent, does he love Jesus, and does he have any children). He answers the same way each time, and occasionally she apologizes (“Oh, I’ve asked that before, haven’t I?”). It’s not a bad routine. It occurs to him that he could move in with Yusuf, just for the short time she hangs in there, and then they could return to his place on the bayou proper. Well, he’ll have a Yusuf-less week to decide how he feels about the prospect. 

The preacher on the television wants his viewers to turn to Daniel in their bibles. Grace diligently reaches for her large print bible. Her hand shakes, not the tremble the night that Yusuf had carried her, but with weak muscles, and the size of the tome makes it worse until she rests it on her lap, fingers immediately seeking out the correct book. 

Nicolò does believe in a god, knows that there are many out there; he’s sought their assistance so frequently over the years that he’d be a fool not to, but he does not love any of them. He respects them, fears them, and alternates between cursing and appreciating the gifts that they seem to have granted him. It would never occur to him to attend any service that wasn’t going to have a direct outcome. Grace takes comfort from it, so maybe that’s the only outcome needed.

“Gracey, eggs or hummus?” Yusuf asks, interrupting her study.

“Pancakes.” 

“Oh, it’s one of those days!” he says with a laugh.

Grace smiles widely. “Don’t forget that they need real maple syrup!” 

The two of them are too precious. Nicolò wonders what their relationship must have looked like when Yusuf was young. Surely this ritual goes back that far, with her cooking breakfasts for him. He likes to think of baby Yusuf with poofy curls and lopsided grin, all energy and mischief. He must remember to ask how much time they’d spent together when Yusuf was smaller, get him to regale them with tales of his boyhood. Nicolò wants to know everything - he just keeps getting sidetracked by bulging arm muscles and enthusiastic kisses. They’ll have time, especially if they move in together like the romantic fools they are. 

  
  


Six mornings without hymns being sung over the smell of frying eggs, six afternoons without side glances inviting brief bedroom interludes, and six nights without the comfortable security of Yusuf’s strong arms have Nicolò ready to abandon his sorcerer’s cottage for good if that’s what it takes. He can barely focus on his studies, flipping absent-mindedly through grimoires and histories, retaining nothing. He dares not cast anything powerful, not with brown puppy dog eyes filling his sight and whispered praises and endearments in all sorts of different languages flitting through his ears around his brain. In short, he’s useless. 

He accomplishes only one thing the entire week, though if it ends up being successful (there is often a waiting period with spellcraft), it could justify his staying away from Yusuf for so long. A timid lady had come to his door, child on her hip, saying that her husband’s moods were becoming more erratic the longer he was out of work. She was afraid of what could happen - though she’d stressed repeatedly that he’d never once taken a hand to her or her daughter. She was afraid for his life and theirs. His desperation was transferring to her, and that’s why she was seeking out magical intervention. He’d done two rituals, one for the job, and one for the mood. He was much more careful about the second, always careful of the will of others. He’d used the eye of a cat to increase the man’s ability to see even in the darkness of this period of his life. His hope is that the man will see that in the greater scope of his life, this is but a rough patch. Nicolò would rather broaden the man’s senses than to limit his actions. If the woman comes back to him, then he’ll take more drastic steps, but the easier spell, making the man’s skills and abilities more apparent in brief encounters (interviews), should help regardless. 

Other than that one flex of his magical muscles, the week is all memories and daydreams until he pulls into Yusuf’s driveway with a sack full of clothes and a smile he can’t stifle. Yusuf’s car isn’t there, a surprise since they’d agreed on suppertime for his return, but Nicolò is quite early, with the sun not even kissing the horizon yet. He knocks on the door, bag over his shoulder, heart thumping eagerly. When no answer comes, he both rings the doorbell and knocks again. 

So it seems that he’s beaten Yusuf home. He looks around him, feeling awkward. Yusuf’s home is sprawling compared to Nicolò's and it’s kept in much better care with not one crooked shutter or pile of paint chips. There are rose bushes on either side of the front step, and a little ceramic frog. He can see where the hose hooks up to the side of the house, though it’s put away for the moment. He sets down his sack and strolls around the yard, then the street, eventually coming back and leaning up against his car. He owns no phone, has no way to contact Yusuf. He’s not run into that being a problem since he’d moved here; he doesn’t know anyone who would want to call him besides his new boyfriend. 

An hour passes. Nicolò's excitement changes to worry. The spell may have extended Grace’s heart’s longevity but there are so many organs like kidneys or lungs that weren’t given that extra time. How tragic would it be for Yusuf to have come to Nicolò begging for his help with her heart only to lose her a week later to something else? 

Nicolò walks next door, a fifty/fifty chance of finding the right neighbor. His luck holds when the door is answered by the same neighbor he’d met earlier. He can’t remember the man’s name. “Hello, I am Yusuf’s friend.”

“Hey, yeah, I remember!” The man isn’t going to forget that awkward meeting for a while. “Oh, you’re trying to visit him.” Nicolò's stomach drops at the man’s sudden serious expression. “He took Grace to the hospital a few days ago. Hasn’t been home since. She was wheezing something terrible; I could hear her over my radio.”

Lungs. Ninety-year-old lungs. Poor Yusuf. “Do you happen to know which hospital?”

He gives Nicolò the name of the closest hospital and basic directions, even considerately providing a second potential hospital if that’s not the right one. He thanks the man before getting back into his car and testing out his memory.

It turns out to be the correct hospital. He passes through the full waiting area in the emergency room to the information desk. The woman seated at the desk there has a strand of hair jutting from a gap in the metal of her glasses into her field of vision, but she doesn’t try to adjust it and he can only conjecture as to how long its been that way, every patient who approaches her being split by the brown of her hair. “Excuse me, I’m trying to find a patient.”

“What’s the name?” she asks.

“Grace. Her last name might be Al-Kaysani. She’s my partner’s grandmother, and that’s his last name.” It’s premature to bandy about the title, but Yusuf would share that youthful grin with him if he’d heard, he’s sure. 

“And what was she brought in for?” The woman’s name badge is coated in stickers so that just like her vision, the name isn’t clear. He thinks it might be Brenae. 

“She was having trouble breathing. He brought her three or four days ago.” 

While she mouses through several screens full of data, Nicolò looks around hoping to spot the curly hair of his lover just happening to pass through. There’s a gift shop that looks directly out to the help desk. Its “get well soon” balloons and flowers in its window have an artificial cheeriness. It’s a commercialization of the healing arts that a swamp shaman like Nicolò can’t abide. He uses flowers in his rituals; he dries them out, crushes their tender petals or uses fresh buds, encouraging growth. He’s never once sold them with little cards bearing empty ‘to’ and ‘from’ slots. 

“Grace Battieste. She was checked in by her grandson Yusuf Al-Kaysani who was consequently admitted the following day.” 

When Nicolò was young, his family had hiked up to Cascata sull’Alferello, a cheap holiday for a too-large family. His brothers, warm from the trek and the summer day, had jumped easily from the ledge near the fall into the water. Between the loudness of the fall’s crashing water and the distance, little Nicolò was a trembling mess. His father had picked him up, and walking them both to the lowest ledge, had plopped him in. Even from that lesser height, it had been endless, like it took hours for his dropped stomach to collide with the water below him. The bracing cold of the water compared to the heat of the day had done nothing to ease his fear response, but at least it felt as though his innards were back in his body again. Now, being told that Yusuf is admitted in the hospital too, he feels a similar sensation, the downward pull of immediate fear.

“Yusuf is ill?” he asks.

“I don’t have the details of his admission. For that, you’d need to speak with someone in that department. Let me draw you a map.” She lays out a little brochure with a map and the names of the physicians in the facility and marks it up with a red pen showing the path that he must take. “If you get lost, double back here. We keep at least one person on desk 24 hours a day.” 

There is compassion in her eyes but solid professionalism in her demeanor. She’s used to this, to telling scared people where to go. He thanks her, holding out the map in front of him like it’s a flashlight, only realizing once he’s far past her that he’d thanked her in Italian. He reverts when stressed. Yusuf will like that, just like Nicolò enjoys his babblings in unknown languages. 

She’d said he was admitted the next day. So that puts him here one or two days. What was keeping him here that long? Was it something painful but not dangerous? Was it the same issue that had affected Grace? He worries his way to Yusuf, fearing the worst and chiding himself for jumping to conclusions.

The woman that helps him doesn’t have a desk or chair that he can see, but is instead drifting from task to task, with a brief but friendly, “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Yusuf Al-Kaysani. He was checked in about two days ago with his elderly grandmother.” 

She exhales, a slight tension leaking out of her like a car tire. “I was hoping his family would find him. We didn’t have anyone we could call. Come, follow me.” She’s got a handful of medical equipment with long wires dangling from her arm in loose loops. She pushes a button on some automatic double doors. They open slowly. “We did our due diligence with his ID, but I’m not even sure it’s real. Wait, don’t think I’m a racist. I’m not. But, I’ve never seen a Louisiana driver’s license like that and you know it says his age is fifty something? There’s no way he can be close to my age.”

Nicolò can’t help the question that she has. He has no idea why his new boyfriend would have a fake ID. “What about Grace?”

“Oh.” She slows her steps and gives him a sorrowful look. “She didn’t make it. This virus hits even younger folk hard. She didn’t suffer long.”

Grace and her hymns. Pancakes with real maple syrup. He feels the tears build in his eyes, even while being hyper focused on the implications of what she’s saying.

“Yusuf caught it.” 

“Yes. The doctors induced a coma this afternoon.” As she finishes saying the words which are another punch to his gut, they come upon the area, not a separate room but a curtained cubicle, and he sees a man covered with tubes looking like a TV show corpse. He’s pale. His lips beneath the breathing apparatus are chapped and greyish. Like a sci-fi movie, the monitors and equipment all around him beep and hum, keeping him alive and observing his vital signs. 

Nicolò grabs hold of one of the slender metal siderails on the hospital bed as his knees buckle beneath him. The beep of the machines and the clatter around the rest of the room zooms out from his ears, quieting as the blood rushes to his brain. He feels a hand on his back, the helpful nurse, and her question is an echo to his tilting consciousness, “Are you going to faint on me?”

He shuts his eyes hard and breathes. “No,” he tells her. “Almost.” He’s in a humiliating position on his knees on the floor with his hands up high above his head and he shouldn’t be worried about his own pride right now, not with Yusuf in a… he can’t even think it. He just has to focus on getting his body under control. Box breathing - an even count of four in, a pause of four, and then an exhale of four. It’s nearly impossible at first, but that’s its purpose; he has to stop his own hyperventilation. 

“Good, just breathe. Would you like me to help get you onto a stool?”

“Yes.” She places her hands on his arms and instead of monkey climbing the bars, he grips onto her. She sets him back and he trusts her, immediately feeling a sturdy padding underneath his butt. 

“It’s got wheels, so keep your feet wide. Would you like some water?”

He shakes his head, already terribly embarrassed. “Just give me a moment.” After a second of thought he adds, “Thank you.”

It takes probably all of five minutes from initial shock to getting his hearing back (with an additional whine that will go away soon), but she’s so busy and he doesn’t want to be an inconvenience to her so he grows irritated with his recovery time. He pushes through it. “I didn’t know he was sick. I thought it was just Grace. Will he live through this?”

“Are you ready to talk about it?”

Understandable that she doesn’t want to make him nearly swoon again. As long as he doesn’t look at Yusuf in the bed with his deathly pallor and gadgetry keeping his systems from failing, he’ll be okay. Instead he focuses on her name badge: Shanice, registered nurse. The adhesive on the tag is peeling at the edges; there are no stickers like the other helpful woman’s. “Yes.”

“Right now he has a lot of fluid in the sacs of his lungs. So much that his heart is struggling to keep up with the process. Our machines are breathing for him now while his body tries to repair itself. Your… husband….?”

“Partner,” he says, repeating the title again as though it’s cemented and not the spontaneous result of week-long tryst that neither of them had wanted to end.

“Your partner’s prognosis is not good. The virus has filled his alveoli and the composition of his lungs is deteriorating.” She hands him a tissue. He takes it, unsure what to do with it. He pats at his eyes only to find that that clears up his vision; he hadn’t known he was crying. His nose looks five times larger when he cries. Yusuf doesn’t know that yet. There is so much that Yusuf doesn’t know about him, will never know about him if he dies. 

“We’re doing what we can, but it is very likely that he won’t survive this. His heart and his kidneys will probably fail because they’re being asked to do so much.”

He risks another look. Yusuf looks as though he already hasn’t survived this. He’s so limp, even his curls are flat with natural oils and days of lying down. His Yusuf is vivacious, a whirlwind of passion and worldliness. He’s the chef of every culinary taste and the talented casanova of their week of debauchery. It can’t be his heart that gives up, because Yusuf’s heart is bigger and better than anyone’s Nicolò has ever met. He’d carried Grace to him in the middle of the night, desperate because of his love for her, and Nicolò's magic was something he’d trusted. 

Nicolò knows magic. His grief transforms into a manic determination with a whip-snap speed. “I want to stay by his side. I need to go home and… put down food for my pets. May I sit with him tonight?”

The woman nods. “Of course. I’d recommend you sitting for a while first, just to get out the last of the dizziness. You sure you don’t want water?”

“I’m sure. Thank you for your help.”

She smiles. “You’re welcome. I’ll get you a visitor’s badge. Sit tight.”

While she’s gone, Nicolò tests out his legs. The ringing is gone and though it’s hard to look at Yusuf, he does so. He vows silently to do everything he can to keep him alive. He will call upon every supernatural entity if he has to in order to help this man survive.

  
  


Nothing is ever truly quiet in a hospital, even during the slowest times of the night. It’s less hectic when Nicolò returns to Yusuf’s side with a sack full of magical ingredients and a head full of determination. He’d gone through a sort of express purification ritual, artificially clearing his stomach with an emetic rather than enduring days of fasting and scrubbing every centimeter of skin with salted holy water while asking forgiveness of the gods. If he had time, he’d stop by at a church and ask atonement, but it’s the middle of the night; most churches close their doors by 7 and Nicolò doesn’t have the technology nor the time to try and find an exception to the rule. His skin is burning with the fervor of the cleansing and his soul feels lighter. He hopes it’s enough.

The curtains are already drawn around Yusuf’s bed, ceiling tracks allowing for several sizes of makeshift room. They don’t need much. Shanice found him a real chair rather than a rolling stool. A neon pink sticky note reads “Partner.” She’d never asked his name. The kindness is touching. He will find a way to repay her kindness regardless of how the ritual he has in mind goes; it won’t be her fault if he’s unable to save Yusuf. He places his sack into the chair and begins pulling out the ingredients beginning with the purification, consecration, and protection components. He has to create a pop-up holy ground, a blessed place to work. While he’d be willing to make a deal with the devil himself for Yusuf’s life, he’ll be petitioning the orishas who behave in more predictable ways; the sacred space is probably overdoing it, but it’s habit and a good one. 

He can’t help but to steal glances at Yusuf as he clears the area and establishes its boundaries. He looks the same as he had earlier, no better, no worse, his body lifeless in his induced deeper-than-sleep coma. He looks dead. Bringing someone back from that point of no return is what got young Nicolò exiled from his own life. 

He hadn’t even needed any of the ritualistic accoutrement the day that he’d held Pietro’s blood-soaked head and willed him back over. It had been pure passion, pure fear, and the gift inside him had blared like a megaphone to the divine. He’d done more than beseeched, but called upon them as though he had the right; it was not arrogance, but he’d also been certain that they would help him and they did. He saw the white swirl of them and felt the warmth of their interest inside of him. He’d pressed his hands to the wounds and made the bones knit back into place and encouraged the blood to coagulate around the point of impact - where the head had collided with rock. The children around him, the friends that they rode bikes with up and down the banks along the river, saw and heard what he couldn’t in that hypnotic state. They saw Nicolò's eyes roll completely white, heard him speak words in a language they couldn’t understand, and saw Pietro’s skull move. One said he saw some of the blood sucking back inside.

It may have been a new beginning for Pietro, but it was the end of Nicolò's life as he’d known it. Their friends no longer stopped by their house asking them to come and play - instead his siblings would meet up with them away from him, conversations would taper off or halt completely when he came into a room, parents would draw closer to their children as though he intended to snatch them away. His own parents, good God-fearing Catholics, knew what he’d done was unnatural; at first, they’d bandied about the idea that he would one day be a saint, one that healed people, but then Nicolò's connection had revealed itself as more than just the kiss of a deity. He could see and talk to the dead, dream about events from the future, and identify others infested with demons or compelled by dark gods. He learned to hide these things too late. They already knew what to watch for by the time that he was sixteen and they feared the knowledge in his eyes even if he never said a word.

He’s not bringing Yusuf back from the dead, but his consciousness is buried so deep and his body is so wracked by the virus that it isn’t far off. 

He lights a candle to Babalú Ayé, orisha of health and dying. He shares his identity with Saint Lazarus and is drawn as a frail light-skinned man with a cane. In some traditions, he’s so disfigured by disease that he’s depicted covered by a costume. Nicolò speaks to the orisha reverently, because that is how things are done, and as quietly as he can because he can hear the beeping of other heart rate monitors in the same room, curtains providing no sound-proofing. His invocation is a mishmash of languages - Cuban, Yoruban, English. He asks Babalú Ayé to hear him. It doesn’t take long before he feels a resonance in his soul, the attention of the supernatural drawn to his words and his fervor and whatever indefinable something draws them to him. 

He has the red rope in one loose figure eight. It’s bamboo, satiny soft with natural antibacterial properties, making the material ideal for the kind of binding spell he has in mind. He hopes that no nurses happen to come in and spy him performing acts of bondage on the man in the hospital bed. Perhaps someday, if Babalú Ayé sees fit to grant his request, they will have the chance to tie each other up with more sensual of intentions. 

Now that he has the orisha’s attention, he begins the spell. It establishes his intention, drawing the focus to the dying loved one beside him and to his own vitality. This in place, he loops the rope around his wrist three times, repeating the word for life as he does. The back of Yusuf’s hand is pierced through with an IV. He tries to loop the rope under, but he worries at the stretch that this puts upon the tape holding the tube in place. Instead, he goes over it, but keeps it loose to not cut off the fluid flow. Three times he does this as well.

“May the length of our lives be shared like this rope, shared between us two, blessed by Babalú Ayé to reach the end together, to die at the same time. I give the years of my life to you Yusuf, and the years of yours to me.”

The tears that fall from Nicolò's eyes are mostly born of a dedicated love, but there is fear in him, despite knowing that he shouldn’t be bringing such feelings to the ritual. He’s shortening his own life by doing this, and he grieves for it. He doesn’t know how many years he is fated to have left but he’ll give what he has to Yusuf. If he had another thirty, then together they will have fifteen. He doesn’t want to die young but at least he won’t spend the time alone. Like his bargain for Grace’s heart, it’s a stop-gap. 

The distance between his wrist and Yusuf’s is enough to allow him access to the items in his bag. He grabs first the ceremonial knife. It is of ancient Mexican design, skulls and lines that dip and rise. It is not very old despite its appearance, but he’d imbued it himself, granting it power as an extension of himself, and its blade is whetstone-sharpened for any purpose he could need. Right now he uses it to cut at the skin beneath the gaps in the rope first on his end and then on Yusuf’s, each side taking on the blood that flows in a barely visible way masked by the red of the rope.

“May my blood flow only as long as long as your blood flows. Let the vitality flow between us, nourishing us and weakening us as one. One heart and one body.”

In his mind, he sees their two separate essences becoming one, lives merging into one. He can feel the orisha, and, more importantly, he can feel it working. It’s like standing near the warmth of a cooking pan. He can feel it and smell it.

Next he grabs the candle. He spills the built up wax onto the cord between them as close to the center point as he can. “May my life be bound to yours and yours to mine and may that bond be sealed with the blessing of Babalú Ayé.”

After setting down the candle, he descends into a weeping prayer of jumbled language, some real and some nonsensical. He only realizes his volume when he hears the sound of a bed being wheeled into an adjacent space on the floor, and he closes his mouth quickly, afraid that someone will part the curtain. No one does.

The divine hear him no matter how softly he speaks; he’d just been overwhelmed with the emotion of what he’s asking for and the intensity he’s putting into the spell. He’s never done anything this important before. Usually his magic is for others. This is more selfish and more personal. In the low commotion of the room (a new patient being triaged), he waits with the glow of the orisha’s attention burning through him and his newly formed link to Yusuf. 

Time passes strangely. He feels almost asleep on his feet at first, as though he can actually feel Babalú Ayé pass his remaining years to his sweet beloved. He will never know how many he loses, but he hopes for Yusuf’s sake that it’s many. The talking around him slows so that he can’t understand the voices’ words. He can hear the thrum of his heart, a slow beat, one resounding thump in what feels like several minutes. His breath is slow like when the sail falls flat for lack of wind. Each blink of his eyes takes forever so that he waits the darkness out until again he sees Yusuf in his hospital bed.

Then, in a rush, time jolts back to normality. His heartbeat picks up and softens so that he can’t hear it, not over the words spoken from the strangers behind the curtain. He flutters his eyelashes, making up for blinks in the slowed-time and because the light in the small space seems so much brighter. He feels alive and joyous. He feels hale, like he’d been playing football just long enough to raise sweat to his forehead and blood to his cheeks. The rope is no longer around his wrist. It had uncoiled itself slowly like a snake while he’d been occupied with sending his years to Yusuf. The small slice he’d made into his wrist is gone, leaving behind only the slightest smear of red. He examines the skin in surprise, notes the pores there, all the little dips and dives of it. It doesn’t feel like his skin. It feels new. Everything feels new. He’s wondrous with the sensation of novelty. 

He doesn’t get the opportunity to explore the change in detail because Yusuf awakens then, gagging, gasping, and thrashing. Nicolò attempts to comfort him, palms of his hands up in the air as he struggles to figure out how to help. He’s choking on the equipment. “Nurse!” he yells, only thinking after he’s already called that he should hide the spell ingredients. The buzzing of the monitor has already given him away anyway, and immediately, there’s someone there in scrubs checking on the long tube down Yusuf’s throat. She yanks it out without any gentleness and for a second Nicolò winces as he sees its length and pities Yusuf’s windpipe. He’s standing as far as he can out of the way, bumping the bloodied and waxed rope with his foot further underneath the bed. 

She replaces the tube with a handheld mask and that’s the last thing Nicolò sees before he’s being escorted out, shoved, really, by urgent hands to somewhere away from the bedlam. He doesn’t resist, but the man is still yelling at him, and he realizes it’s because he’s not actually been listening. The voice was all he’d taken in. The medical practitioner is trying to tell him where he needs to go. He’s pointing to the doors and telling him over and over, but he’d been too lost in the swirl of everything to notice. He nods and obeys, pushing the automatic door button on the double doors out of the area. 

He’s only a few steps beyond them when his heart stops beating and he falls to the floor dead.


	4. Accidental Immortality

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To those who skipped chapter 3: Grace and Yusuf got sick. Grace passed. To buy Yusuf some time, Nicolo magically bound their lives together. He believes that he is reducing his own life and sharing his remaining years with Yusuf. Now, if you want to do a quick search for the sentence "Their trip is mostly silent," you can read without all that yicky hospital stuff but with all the squishy feels.

No death is pleasant, but suffocation, that is one of the worst ways that Yusuf has experienced over his many, many years. When he revives, whatever magic that keeps him immortal eliminates the virus from his body, and he’s healthy again. The women and men at the hospital don’t know that he’s miraculously recovered yet; they’re still pushing the oxygen mask at him, and talking about retrying ventilation as though he isn’t there objecting, shaking his head and pointing vigorously to the beeping monitor beside him. His heart rate is slow and strong, his blood pressure normal, his O2 levels wiggling between 98 and 99. They replace the vital signs monitor, convinced the old one is malfunctioning. While they do, he tells them repeatedly from under the mask (and to the side of it when one of them isn’t jamming it onto his face) that he’s fine. 

It’s not their fault that they don’t understand. Their job is to help their patients stave off death one incident at a time, delaying what is for most an inevitable conclusion. They can’t know that in their hospital is a man who has died as many times as the wind.

The medical practitioners come in waves as they discuss and regroup behind the scenes. Healthy skepticism keeps them trying to find something wrong, some reason why he went from death (or the brink of it, as they think) to perfect health. It’s important that he not become known as a medical miracle; he doesn’t want his face on a black and white newspaper beside a Satan made of clouds and a celebrity couple headed for divorce, and, moreover, he doesn’t want to catch the eye of those who might find him an ideal lab rat. 

The superstitious nature of the south has kept him safe from having to start over. His family had taken his longevity in stride; Eunice believed it was the Christian god’s will and that there was a higher purpose that would one day be revealed. He became his own grandson with surprising ease given the world’s new technology and its Big Brother-like perception but with Grace gone he has no reason not to bury this identity, to move on as someone new. Well, almost no reason. 

If Nicolò wants to stay, then he will stay. Yusuf’s heart couldn’t leave the light-eyed soft-hearted magic man even to save his own freedom (if it came down to something as drastic as that). If he had lived only one life, he might not have seen the rarity of their bond, but he knows what true love feels like and even with the nearly thousand years he’s had on the earth, he’s felt it only a few times. Finding Nicolò was like finding the rarest of pearls. He would be a fool to toss that away.

“I want to be released,” he tells the first person who looks at him like a person instead of a medical mystery. “Do I need to sign something?”

The woman is checking his pulse by hand, her eyes darting between her watch and his face. Her scrubs have little pigs; every fifth one or so is in a mud puddle. She smiles briefly, courteously. “I think the docs are going to want to keep you a little longer.” She lets go of his wrist. “Well, it’s not the machine acting up. I’m out of ideas.”

“I need my clothes and any paperwork I need to sign for Grace, my grand...mother. She had the same virus. She didn’t make it.”

The nurse nods. “I know. I was here when you both came in.”

He’d been half-crazed with worry when they’d come in. The memories are a blur: Grace unable to breathe, being rigged up to machines, curt but nice hospital workers whisking her away, doing tests on him. She does look familiar, but there have been so many faces over so many years. 

She continues, “Your partner came here to look for you both.”

The clouds part on his grief, just the sunshine of foolish love peeking through. “Nicolò was here?” He can hear his own excitement and he suspects by the lack of change in her face that she’d known what his reaction would be.

“He was sitting by you when you began to flatline.” For the moment, they are somewhat alone, the collective group of confused doctors either discussing Yusuf’s spontaneous revival or splitting their attention with other emergency patients, but she speaks softly anyway. “I took away the saint candle that he brought before he could get in trouble for starting fires in a hospital.” 

Saint candles. Poor Nicolò! He’d come not just to visit his dying lover but to heal him! And instead, Yusuf had died. Oh, he hopes desperately that Nicky doesn’t think that his magic failed, that he isn’t terribly upset at himself for letting Yusuf die. “Does he know I’ve recovered?” Without meaning to, his hand has struck out, snakelike to bite her arm. He catches himself immediately, and apologizes, retracting his hand. He hadn’t meant to startle her. 

“Yes. He’s in the waiting room. He had a bit of a fainting spell, but he’s had some juice and crackers and looks like he’s feeling fine.”

Though he’d just flatlined an hour ago, Yusuf is far more worried about Nicky’s fainting spell. Had he cared that much? Tears sting his eyes. “My heart chose so well,” he says, wiping at his liquid emotions. “Can I see him? I mean, can he see me?”

She raises an eyebrow and in another whisper, she says, “Last time he sat in here with you he performed a Santeria ritual.”

“Quite a successful one.” She shakes her head, obviously disapproving, though she, like so many others in this area of America, believes. “What if I promise that he won’t bring me back to life again?” he asks with a wry smile. Nicky came here to save him because he cares. This thing between them may be ill-advised but it’s not one-sided. The joy of that makes him feel as though he could spread wings and fly from the hospital. 

She crosses her arms. “Look who thinks he’s funny.”

Behind her, two of the doctors approach. They share the nurse’s disapproval, it seems, about his spontaneous recovery, but with none of her secret amusement. They introduce themselves and explain in medical terms what was happening to his body just before he died, and what their equipment is telling them now. They want to give him a chest scan to measure the damage to his lungs before they proceed setting up a new plan of treatment. His lungs are as clean as a new air purifier filter. Rather than baffle the medical community here, he insists upon signing discharge papers. The wait before he can see Nicky again is excruciating.

Three and a half hours after Yusuf died, he emerges from the double doors looking like a sexy GQ cover model who just happens to be pushed in a wheelchair by a hospital employee. His hair is still greasy but his curls don’t look fizzled and his skin color is dark instead of pale, lips and cheeks rosy with natural color. His smile is wide and child-like when he spots Nicolò, who had just by chance been looking in that direction at that time, having finally given up on the re-runs of Happy Days on the subtitled television hanging in the corner. His heart soars. He’d felt the spell work, felt Babalú Ayé’s attention, but then Yusuf had been convulsing and the machines had been beeping and that woman had ripped out the tube and he’d assumed the worst. After Nicolò had lost consciousness (only for a minute or two according to a nurse, though it felt like a lifetime had passed), they told him that Yusuf had pulled through somehow, but that he was in critical condition. Now, here is looking like the epitome of health, and Nicolò knows that the magic worked.

He rushes to Yusuf who jumps up from his wheelchair and embraces him there in the middle of the crowded hospital waiting room while the orderly pulls on his patient’s sleeve and asks him to sit back down. Yusuf covers Nicolò's face in kisses, ignoring the orderly completely. “Are you alright?” Yusuf asks, worrying voice and words the same as they’d been in bed when Nicolò had had to slow things down; just like then, he’s on top of the world.

“I’m perfect. You’re alive!”

Yusuf’s palms cover his cheeks, squeezing his face as he draws their foreheads together. “You are perfect. You came for me.” 

Finally, Orderly Spoilsport, obviously unmoved by their romantic display, demands that Yusuf sit down with a loud no-nonsense voice and a rough hand on his shoulder. He looks up from the chair fondly and Nicolò knows that if it wasn’t for the orderly, they’d still be kissing. 

“You should pull your car around to the front.” 

It takes a moment for Nicolò to realize that the orderly is talking to him. Yes, of course! Yusuf shouldn’t have to drive himself home after such an ordeal! “I will be right back.” He can’t help but to snag one more kiss before rushing off. He fishes his keys out of his pocket while he searches for his car and glows from the inside out with the joy and pride of having helped Yusuf recover. 

The orderly keeps his hands on Yusuf as he climbs into Nicolò's white Ford Taurus as though he expects him to collapse at any moment. Yusuf is gracious about it, thanking the man even though his assistance is more than unnecessary. He immediately reaches out for Nicolò's hand who will have to adjust to one-handed driving because he’s not letting go on this drive or any other that they take together. He hopes there are many. 

Their trip is mostly silent. Nicolò doesn’t ask for directions; he feels attuned to the house’s location despite having only driven to it twice, but Yusuf advises him anyway once they fall into the more confusing smaller residential streets. He’s like the birds that intuit north and south with the change of the seasons; the house is part of Yusuf and he is Nicolò's south. He’d felt this way before binding their lives together, but with the magic’s help, it’s more concrete. He doesn’t regret giving Yusuf his years, because he’d already committed those to his love, albeit in an abstract way.

After he pulls into the driveway and turns the key in the ignition, he looks over at the man holding his hand. He’s lost his grandmother and almost his life, and he’s staring back with the intensity of a man who knows that, eyes round and moist like a stray puppy begging for a home. “Are you okay?” he asks.

“I need to tell you something.”

The words don’t frighten him. “I have my own confession to make. Would you like to talk inside, maybe after a shower?”

Yusuf groans and his hand releases for the first time since they’d left the hospital. “Oh, Nicky! I hadn’t even thought about what I must smell like! Or look like!” He flips down the sun visor on the passenger side and after a momentary glance at the tiny glass there groans again. “You hugged me in such a state!”

It’s hard to resist smiling. A common problem around someone as bright as the sun. He had just thought that Yusuf might want to wash the dying off himself before diving into secrets or deep thoughts. 

After they get out of Nicolò's car, their hands find each other again and Yusuf doesn’t let go while fishing out his keys from his coat. He slides it in the lock and hesitates. Nicolò squeezes encouragement. 

It’s obvious that Grace is no longer here. It’s a tangible difference in the house, though her bible is still on the small table near her recliner, a mostly empty glass of water beside it, evidence that she’d been there not so long ago. It feels darker in the house without her. 

Nicolò closes the door behind them while Yusuf looks around, taking in the emptiness. He sighs. “I’ve lost so many, Nicky. I’ve never rebuilt with someone else so soon after losing everyone.”

It’s an inappropriate time to melt over the words, both the nickname which hasn’t been his since before adolescence and the promise of a united future. He keeps quiet, hiding the warmth that blossoms in his chest from his mourning beloved. 

Yusuf turns to him, pulls him closer by their joined hands, and kisses him with soft closed lips. It’s delicate. Nicolò has already promised to not die before him, but Yusuf doesn’t know that. He’s probably looking at him as just one more sad grieving process, but even still, he’s pursuing it, offering to rebuild together. Nicolò has fallen in love with a very strong man.

“I am going to take your advice and bathe. I won’t be long.” 

“Take your time. I know my way around.”

He has already prepared meals in Yusuf’s home before, and though it was never unsupervised previously, he feels no hesitation rummaging through cupboards and crisper drawers. He avoids Grace’s favorites, no eggs or eggplants or sweetbreads. There are packages of dried pasta, not preferable but quick, and he puts the water on to a boil while he chops up an overripe tomato and dismisses a wilted package of fresh basil. His staples are not Yusuf’s, but he makes do. He’s not a master chef creating an eight-course meal; he’s just trying to fill their currently empty bellies.

Yusuf does as bidden and it isn’t until Nicolò is already straining the pasta that he hears the slap of bare feet on tile behind him. He anticipates with each step and then arms snake around his waist pulling him into a tight backwards hug. 

“You’re making us a meal.” Yusuf kisses his neck. If he didn’t have steaming water in front of him and a growling stomach, he’d be tempted to start something. 

“It is not an impressive spread.”

“I disagree.” He feels the smile against his skin. 

Dislodging his boyfriend only for the purpose of meal preparation, he adds the pasta to the bowl of sauce and seasonings he has waiting. 

“I could have lived under the water until I formed gills,” Yusuf jokes. “Even my eyelashes felt dirty.” He sits at the table where Nicolò had already laid out dishes and silverware for them. He’s wrapped in a fuzzy navy blue robe, loose grey drawstring pants beneath. 

The house is always cool, regardless of the temperature outside. Nicolò has never lived in a home with AC but thinks that it must be terribly confusing to the body, just the simple act of stepping outside could be a shock of heat or cold. He doesn’t want the world to stay at a steady 75 degrees; he wants hot summer breezes that carry the smell of neighbors’ suppers and cooling winds that rattle the house and direct the rain onto his porch in violent spatters. While Yusuf’s home feels safe, it feels too safe, as though real life can’t penetrate it. 

He brings out the warm bowl of pasta and sets it on the trivet between their two plates. It’s paltry and it’s slapdash, but at least he hadn’t used any fruit spreads that would go pushed to the side this time. 

Yusuf looks at the food with hunger and Nicolò with gratitude. “ _ Shukran _ . I am starving. I didn’t even know until I smelled the food.”

It doesn’t smell like much of anything, even with the dried spices, but Nicolò agrees. He’d thought he was sharing dinner with Yusuf and Grace when he’d come over and he hasn’t eaten since then other than the crackers that the nurse had brought him along with the orange juice after his fainting. It’s been longer than that for Yusuf who hadn’t been able to even breathe, let alone eat. He’ll have to perform a ritual of thanksgiving to the saint who made this moment possible.

They eat quickly and quietly, making conversation only with their eyes. Under the table, their legs entangle, each holding firm to one calf of the other. Even he can feel the absence of Yusuf’s grandmother, and he wishes that he could expand his essence to be everything that his lover needs. Though he’d never claim such in front of Yusuf, they are both orphans in a way. He can never return home to his family. 

It was so hard at first that he’s not sure he remembers those early years as they really happened. He called upon gods and saints and spirits for company, feeling their swirling presences around him when no one else was. They’d given him money, but it wasn’t much. They had other children to feed. He’d run out so soon, and scraped by taking odd jobs, crashing on the couches of newly-made friends, relying on kindness and luck to keep him alive. 

It’s good that Yusuf is settled, a home-owner with neighbors whom he can rely on, and he has his artistic skills to keep mediocre pasta on the table. He will grieve and he will be lonely no matter how hard Nicolò tries to be every family member to him, but he isn’t stranded without prospects or hope. 

Around the same time their forks chime against the bottom of their bowls and each has emptied the water from their glasses. They’ve kept their mouths as busy as their minds.

“That was delicious. Thank you.”

“It was adequate,” says Nicolò, not willing to accept any polite compliments that are untrue. 

“You need rest. Let’s talk in the morning.”

Nicolò can see it now. They are going to fight over spoiling each other. Both of them are givers, nurturers, and neither seems entirely comfortable being the one to receive. Yusuf had nearly died, scraped by only with supernatural intervention, and he is concerned that  _ Nicolò _ looks tired. 

He’s right. Nicolò needs to sleep in a bed. The burst of energy he’d felt after the transfer of his life to Yusuf wore off quickly, and he’s been fighting the exhaustion of a sleepless night spent in the hospital ever since he came to from his fainting spell. 

“I agree to your terms,” he says. 

They prepare for bed in such a domestic way, as though they’ve lived together for years. His green firm-bristled toothbrush is already in the holder next to Yusuf’s white rather worn-looking one. They brush side by side at the sink. When Yusuf relieves his bladder, he doesn’t leave the bathroom, but fishes out a meter’s worth of dental floss, and focuses on removing errant dots of basil. 

“ _ Hayati _ , you may want to shower as well.” One eyebrow draws up humorously as he does so. 

Nicolò grimaces. He hadn’t even considered the state of his own body odors. He’s been distracted by trying to be a comfort. 

One of Yusuf’s strong hands wraps around his waist. “Would you like me to undress you?” The playful look in his eyes is one that he has become quite familiar with, even in their short time together. He’s come to appreciate it immensely. 

He nods, unsure how much either of them are actually in the mood for sexually - it’s been a very emotional few days - but following the flow of Yusuf’s words and actions. The slow smooth process of getting him naked is familiar and more than a little entrancing. Each time he uncovers skin, Yusuf strokes or kisses it. The clothes he puts straight into the hamper in the bathroom while never removing his gaze from Nicolò's body. Little goosebumps cover his skin in the cool of the room and under the little touches and presses of lips. 

“How warm do you prefer the water?” he asks, hands stroking down from Nicolò's shoulder blades to the tops of his buttocks. 

It had taken some experimentation to get the right temperature in Yusuf’s shower. He would guess the pipes are old by how long they take to heat, but then once they get there, they fight cooling down. “Not too hot.”

Yusuf obeys the request, tweaking the two knobs until he can find the right balance. “You should test it,” he suggests. Nicolò does so, letting the water run under just his hand while beside him Yusuf takes off his own clothes, casting them off without any of the attention he had shown Nicolò before. 

The temperature is perfect, so he pulls out the little lever that makes the water come down from the top, and steps under. He can hear and feel Yusuf climbing in behind him as he submerges his whole head, water creating drum crashes in his ear and blurring his vision. 

Sharing a shower with Yusuf is like sharing anything else with him, easy and very comfortable. They entwine, bodies slick, each half under the spray and half exposed to the open air. The parts of him pressed against Yusuf are warm and stimulated by skin and patches of body hair. He lets Yusuf lather up first his hair with pungent tea tree oil shampoo and then his body with a practical white bar of soap that doesn’t smell like anything but the word clean. Yusuf’s fingers are so strong but they handle the work with delicacy, tracing lazy loops into his scalp until he’s drowsy with sleepiness, and pressing the flat of his palms into delicate places like his armpits and the back of his knees, sympathetically trying not to tickle though Nicolò doesn’t have any ticklish places. 

Nicolò isn’t sure how to console a giver. He’s just letting Yusuf nurture him because it seems to be bringing him peace.

“It’s been a while since I’ve been bathed,” he says with a content sigh.

“Tell me, Nicky, has it been months for that too?” Yusuf is mocking him, but he doesn’t feel affronted, because he’s not actually being judged.

“Years.” 

The sudsy strong hands roam around to the firmness that had just been against Yusuf’s hip and he nearly chokes on a mouth full of water. He coughs and sputters, all to his boyfriend’s amusement if the eye twinkle is any indication - he must watch out for that mischievous streak in the future. For now, he just lets Yusuf’s hand stroke him with well-practiced movements and tries not to drown. He moans just loud enough to be heard over the water; Yusuf has said so many times during their week together that he enjoyed his sounds that he may exaggerate it slightly for his benefit. He’s used to threadbare walls and shared quarters.

He finds Yusuf’s prick in a similarly firm state, but his surprise grip doesn’t nearly drown the dark eyed man. Instead, he presses teeth to Nicolò's shoulder, biting with jaw wide like he would an apple. 

They stroke each other, sliding with similar speeds and kissing or nibbling shower-rinsed skin. The room is steamy and wet and Nicolò's lashes are heavy with droplets and his mind heavy with the fog of lust. When they both reach orgasm, one and then the other within moments, they cling so tightly to each other that not even water can drip between them and they struggle to catch their breaths while a puddle forms within the bowl of their chests.

It’s never been like this, not like it has with Yusuf. Sex could range from boring to intense, but it’s never felt like an action that actually bound him to the other person. It is its own kind of magic, knotting them up as surely as Nicolò's rope had in the hospital. He has always felt centered out by the universe, watched by powerful unseen forces, but he’s never had someone with him for that. It’s like bringing someone home to his parents.

Yusuf kisses his forehead. “Is this magic?” he asks in awe.

He nods, unable to explain in words what was happening to them. Had the gods and the saints accepted his lover, extended out their supervision to Yusuf because of the blood pact he had made with Babalú Ayé? They share one life now. He has to explain it soon, as soon as the sun comes up, as soon as they’ve both recharged their strength to handle confession and revelation.

The blankets smell like Yusuf. He had lost his ability to smell them by the end of their near week together, but now, with the time apart, he’s regained it. Once beneath them, he inhales deeply of the welcome fragrance and it becomes a yawn, one of the deep ones that rattle the bones. Yusuf chuckles. “I agree.” 

They share only one kiss, but it is as sweet as medjool dates, and then both men fall hard into unconsciousness.

  
  


Nicolò blinks under the brightest sun. He can hear the cringe of the muscles around his temples. He covers his eyelids. The tears caused by the stinging light flow down his cheek. The music is soft at first, a woodwind in solo, but as his vision acclimates, it grows louder. The ground beneath his feet is dirt, loose with the tiniest rocks that roll dangerously beneath his sandals. He doesn’t know to where he’s walking, maybe just away from the hot wind, somewhere with a wall that could stop it from drying out his eyes even more.

A voice joins the instrument. He realizes that’s where he’s headed. A cluster of men in earth and slate-colored clothing. 

“Yusuf, join us!” The name is said without the love he uses in it, as though it’s just a name and not the most important word that Nicolò knows. “You cannot mourn forever.” The language isn’t Italian nor English, but one he understands anyway. It is full of ah’s and ell’s and it flows like the music of the flute. 

Yusuf materializes beside him and Nicolò recognizes him despite how different he looks, but can’t feel his presence there. There is no sparkle in the dark eyes, no Cheshire grin lurking beneath the full beard that hides his lips, and his body is slender, shoulders more like Nicolò's under the black loose-fitting garment. He passes Nicolò without notice and without joy.

“Join us, my friend. Please, eat and listen to Djamel’s song; it will cheer you.” The man’s eff’s are long, slurred as if by drink, but the people here aren’t intoxicated, at least not by alcohol. The people are dry like the warm land around them. They don’t notice Nicolò; he is as a ghost among them. 

“I cannot be cheered.” Yusuf’s voice is a dark chasm. 

Nicolò reaches for him, but there is a distance between them, a rift of reality and time, and his hand never comes close to anything. 

“We will keep you company. You don’t have to be alone,” the man says.

“Alone,” whispers Yusuf. His sad eyes look through Nicolò to some far distance beyond him. “I am cursed to always be alone.” 

He awakes gasping, the deep sorrow and loneliness pressing the air straight out of his lungs. Immediately, the arms that had already been around him tighten and Yusuf’s mouth is behind the curl of his ear whispering sweet-sounding words in languages he’ll never know. He shivers, the fear that had been so intense releasing slowly, deflating by the smallest pinprick. His name mixes with the foreign words: Nicolòs, Nickys, and Nicos sprinkled throughout them like poetry, like confessions of love.

“I dreamed you were all alone.” Yusuf thin and haunted, mourning the loss of who? Everyone. Is that how it had been? Had he tapped into his memories or had it been Nicolò's imagination, filling in gaps to the things he knows about Yusuf’s life? His eyes still feel sun-sensitive and his mouth is desert dry. It had been more than a dream; he’s sure. His hands grab at the strong muscular arms, encouraging them to crush him; he needs Yusuf’s comfort more than he needs the air. 

“But you were next to me,” Yusuf assuages, his lips brushing Nicolò's neck so that he can feel the words. 

“I haven’t always been.” 

How long had Yusuf been alone? He’d lost everything, everyone before. Before Grace. What was it he had said last night? Something about never having rebuilt with someone else so quickly. It comes in and goes out in waves. He’d felt that through the dream, through the connection. 

“The past is no longer. You are in my bed now, and that’s what matters.” 

Nicolò rolls over, finds himself staring into the deep soulful brown eyes. Like his own, they hide little. He espies concern there, hesitancy over here, listlessness in a tiny corner over there, and throughout, glittering like gaudy jewelry, love. 

“It was bright. I could barely see at first. There was a group of men. One was playing a flute. They were trying to cheer you, but your family had died. You had lost a wife carrying your child. It had been a long time for them, but not for you. They were tired of trying to help. You didn’t belong anymore.” He’s losing the images as fast as he can conjure them. The ache is what remains, the sensations. 

Yusuf recognizes what he’s talking about. Five more emotions enter his face, none of them good, and Nicolò wonders if he should have said anything at all. “Nadira,” he says. “It was a dangerous time to be alive.”

“What time?”

Yusuf’s jaw shifts, his mouth tweaking strangely to the side, as unshed tears turn his eyes into mirrors. “Maybe 800 years ago, 900? We didn’t keep track of time in the same way. It wasn’t as important.” His voice lightens, “No train schedules to keep.”

Nicolò hadn’t seen any trains or cars or streetlights. No one had been on a phone. What Yusuf’s telling him is impossible, but had he not done impossible things his whole life? “How long had it been since you’d made love, before me?”

“My wife died in 1960. It was a few years before that.”

He recalls with crystal clarity how Yusuf had laughed at his one year of celibacy, said that it had been much longer than that for him. At the time, he’d assume maybe it was twice as long as his own. He hadn’t known that the man he was sleeping with was an immortal. 

Yusuf is watching his reaction, ready to help if he panics, ready to be rejected, ready to explain if Nicolò doesn’t believe him. There was a kind of magic between them the first night, when he’d trusted the man coming to ask for a healer, and then, the attraction and acceptance that followed on the porch in the morning. He has always believed in Yusuf, and he does now. “Are you a god?”

Crooked teeth answer the question, genuine amusement. “Not in the least, though I wouldn’t mind your worship.” 

There is sunlight coming in through a crack in the peach lace curtains that makes a solid vertical line on the wall. He’d watched that line travel lower as the days went on during their sex vacation, and since there is no clock, he’s learned to tell the time by its progress. It’s late morning, maybe noon. He’s ready to eat again. It’s strange how the most basic body functions still continue on even in the wake of world-shattering news. 

“You just don’t die?”

“I die. I just don’t stay that way.” He plants a brief kiss on Nicolò's lips. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I’m sorry I worried you.”

Yusuf lifeless on the hospital bed, the worst sight he’s ever seen, the scariest by far, and it was just one more death for Yusuf. “Worry…” he says. The word doesn’t convey how he’d felt at that moment, the minutes before he’d remembered that he was a medicine man and could help. Before he’d petitioned the Orisha for intervention. The epiphanies hit him in a series that stack, one atop the other, interrupting each one before he can fully explore it. He hadn’t needed to do the ritual; Yusuf would have resurrected anyway. He  _ did _ resurrect. And the ritual had worked; he had felt that, felt the acceptance and intervention and the intertwining of their lives. That meant that when Yusuf died, he would have died. When he’d fainted...had he actually fainted? Had that been death? It had felt like he’d been out for so long though the nurse had said just a minute. It had felt like he’d had to crawl his way back into consciousness, or had it been life?

“What have I done?” he asks, sitting up and burying his face in his hands. Had he truly died?

“Nicolò, are you alright?” 

It’s the first time that Yusuf has asked him that question when the answer is a resounding no. When he doesn’t speak, he feels movement beside him, Yusuf rising up, and a tentative hand placed on his back. He doesn’t want to scare Yusuf, make him think that he’s going to be abandoned again, so he forces himself to disclose now before he can mentally extract everything or before he goes mad trying.

“I performed a ritual while you were in the coma.”

“Yes, the nurse told me. She hid your saint’s candle.” Despite his worry, Yusuf finds that funny, especially when Nicolò looks at him with surprised wide eyes. “She didn’t want you to be banned from my side for setting the hospital on fire.” 

“I wonder what she thought of the rope.”

Now it’s Yusuf’s turn to look surprised. “She didn’t mention that. I prefer being awake when tied up.”

Nicolò swallows hard. He doesn’t know how to make this admission. He’d thought that when he told Yusuf, he would have to downplay how he’d sacrificed his own life, trading the extra years away and sharing them. Now, he has to minimize having accidentally made himself immortal. 

He’s no longer hungry.

“I called upon the Orisha to unite the years of our lives.” His darling, syrup-eyed lover waits for an explanation, obviously ignorant as to what an Orisha is and probably not understanding the other part either. “I bound our lives together. I wanted to give you the remaining years of my life and take your short minutes into my own.” 

A quiet stretches over both of them. They look at each other, and the room, and the blankets, and back to each other all while rolling over the implications. Yusuf reaches out and takes his hand. He kisses each knuckle before tucking the hand under his chin. “You are amazing. How does one with such kindness exist?”

“I couldn’t let you die. I just found you. It was selfish.”

The warm smile finds him, kisses at his lips and his nose. “No, it was beautiful like you.” Their foreheads unite and still. “I dreamed too. There were shadows around you and they watched you and they loved you. I was jealous.”

“They see you now, too,” says Nicolò, remembering how he’d felt observed in the shower, closer to Yusuf than natural. “Will I keep living now, even after death?”

“I don’t know your magic like you do, Nicky. Is it selfish…” Yusuf interrupts himself by kissing him, this time deeply and with a swirl of tongues that brings Nicolò bodily awareness. “Is it selfish that I hope so? I would share a thousand lifetimes with you and still not have found the right words to describe your eyes.”

Yusuf keeps the fear at bay. Living forever is terrifying but doing so with a man like this, that could be heaven. He lets the kisses sweep away his anxiety, lets his lover’s strong dark hands distract him from existential dread. They make love again, and it’s quick but it’s vital and reassuring. Giving themselves to each other is the only way to temper the excitement and apprehension. It provides them with touchstones, a grounding, and pushes aside the details of what happens now. 

After they’ve washed up, each man taking time at the sink with white rags, foaming soap, and purple-colored mouthwash, they make breakfast in the well-lit kitchen. It’s strangely quiet without the TV sermons, and Nicolò keeps close to Yusuf to help him not feel that absence so acutely. Yusuf doesn’t avoid Grace’s favorite items as Nicolò had. The image in his head of Grace frying up pancakes for a little curly-haired boy flips so that the elderly old woman with her scratchy voice and loose skin is young and it is Yusuf who makes the meal. She would pull on his pant leg calling “Jidee, will the pancakes be done before church?” and her grandfather, eternally poised in his mid-thirties would smile his most crow’s foot-filled smile, and say, “Yes, my Gracey, and I will use real maple syrup.” It’s not a flashback, but just make-believe, and yet it is all too easy to see having happened. He’d watched her grow old and die and Nicolò can’t imagine the pain of that once, let alone time and again. On the other hand, how lucky for her to always have someone right there who loved her, ready to support and nurture her. 

When Yusuf glances at her recliner as he lays out the dishes, Nicolò wraps an arm around his waist. “She was never alone. Her songs will be missed.”

Yusuf rests his head back until it softly bumps Nicolò's. “I will tell you many stories of her, and together we will remember her.”

It’s a lovely idea.

Their ankles cross beneath the table again as they sit down for their late breakfast.

“So what will be the first spell you teach me?” asks Yusuf, his mouth rudely full of buttery grits. 

Nicolò adds slices of nearly brown banana to his, and they warm and melt in the soupy grains. “Spellcraft will come later. Do you speak latin?”

“I have forgotten many languages and latin is one.”

“You’ll have to start with learning about the otherworldly before you learn how to call upon its aid.” 

“Ah, start with my ABCs, eh? What would you say if I called you a spoil sport?” Yusuf nudges at his foot playfully. 

“These are not forces to be played with.” He sounds more chiding than he feels. He likes that they will dabble together in the magical arts. Though he’s learned some new things from an acquaintance now and then, he’s never practiced spellcraft with another person. It’s good to instill in his partner some caution. After all, he had accidentally bumbled into making himself immortal, and that was while giving magic its due respect. 

“I understand.” 

“You will have much to teach me as well.” There’s so much to process. How will they live? Must they always move around to keep others from noticing their lack of aging? How long do they stay dead? Does it vary based on the reason for their deaths? How does Yusuf keep from going crazy with all the extra years? The loss? “I think you should start with teaching me your native language… and how to cook your paella.”

Yusuf laughs loudly. “You have my heart and my recipe book,  _ hayati _ . It is all for you.” 

“ _ Hayati _ ,” Nicolò repeats. It doesn’t sound exotic on his own tongue. “What does it mean?”

With a dastardly eye twinkle, Yusuf says, “My life.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much Mewbotz! Your art makes this fic so much prettier!


End file.
